Bug#777112: UDD: prioritizing tasks

[Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>]

Package: qa.debian.org
User: qa.debian.org@packages.debian.org
UserTags: udd
Severity: wishlist


The initial implementation of iCalendar support doesn't set a priority
on any of the tasks.

Currently, the list of task items in the feeditems array does not have
any priority attribute.

The feeditems array is built from $uddd.dmd_todos

$uddd.dmd_todos is built in inc/dmd-data.rb

When the dmd_todos array is built, each item needs to be classified with
one or more attributes that will be the UDD priority for the todo

The cal.rb code will then need to read these UDD priority values and
translate them to the very simple priority values used in iCalendar,
e.g. 0=undefined, 1=High, 5=Normal, 9=Low

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2445#section-4.8.1.9

   A CUA with a three-level priority scheme of "HIGH", "MEDIUM" and
   "LOW" is mapped into this property such that a property value in the
   range of one (US-ASCII decimal 49) to four (US-ASCII decimal 52)
   specifies "HIGH" priority. A value of five (US-ASCII decimal 53) is
   the normal or "MEDIUM" priority. A value in the range of six (US-
   ASCII decimal 54) to nine (US-ASCII decimal 58) is "LOW" priority.

This type of prioritization is very simplistic and coarse.  Internally,
UDD can probably use more sophisticated set of attributes and each
output format would then have its own way to map these to its own
prioritization scheme.  For example, while iCalendar sets the priority
attribute, HTML may simply render more important items by putting them
in bold.

Some tasks should also have a deadline in the iCalendar feed:
- next testing freeze
- fix a package to avoid auto-removal from testing
- replacing a PGP key that is expiring in the keyring

and these deadlines may be useful to help compute the iCalendar priority
although an ideal iCalendar client would provide a way to visualize the
difference between tasks with and without deadlines anyway.  The
dmd_todos may need to have an optional deadline attribute that will be
set for those tasks where it is relevant.