tsilkast is an application written to address noticeable 'gaps' in other task management programs. Specifically, most task management programs assume there is a concrete objective, and are geared towards managing items in a linear fashion to meet that goal.
tsilkast does not assume there's an overall objective. Its goal is to allow non-linear tasks to be jotted down in a quick and efficient manner. It does allow parent/child relationships, but goes beyond the traditional 'one parent, many children' approach taken by most task managers, providing a many to many relationship between tasks.
The key features of tsilkast are:
- rss feed of tasks
- any task can have an unlimited number of child tasks
- any task can have an unlimited number of parent tasks
- every task can be flagged as X percent complete regardless of position in the task tree
- tasks with children can be automatically flagged as X percent complete
- graphical representation of task completedness
- web based interface
In addition to the web interface, a side goal of the project is to allow entries to be viewed, edited, deleted, and added via the command line. This will likely be done using python, though the exact method is still under debate.
The programming language for the web frontend to tsilkast is undecided. Initially it was intended to be PHP based, but since the CLI version is being done in Python, it may be that the web front end will also be Python.
The backend storage will be mysql by default, with support for postgresql being devloped concurrently with the rest of the app. In any event, database calls are being abstracted with the intent that changing the data storage will be fairly simple.
tsilkast is designed to run on any Linux distribution, with a preference being shown for the debian distribution (which means that though there will be a scripted installation which should work on any linux platform, there will also be .deb files provided for easy installation on debian. As the project matures, if .rpm files are created for distribution, the the .deb's will be updated before the .rpm's)