Hamster is looking for a new maintainer

I keep going back and forth on this, but the truth is i don’t have time for hamster anymore.

So i’m looking for a new maintainer.

First of all – don’t panic – the project is not going to die – as i’m using hamster on daily basis myself (and it does everything i need), i will keep making sure it works at least on Fedora (my distro of choice), but i need someone taking care of pull requests and making sure hamster stays on focus and doesn’t gain weight via preferences (i’ve seen oh so many requests for that lately and majority fall far outside the 80/20 rule; it is however compelling to please everyone, and that’s what i’m afraid my replacement would try to do)

Ideally the candidate would have something to show that he and she have created, because if there is anything that i fear more than extinction is the project falling into somebody’s hands who will botch it up

I’ve disabled comments. If you are interested, please contact me at toms.baugis@gmail.com

Also, code: https://github.com/projecthamster/

News

May 13, 2013

1 Comment

hamster 1.03 – bugfix release; affects fresh installs

grab the latest version from the tags page

•  fix issue #61 – installation was missing initial database for fresh installs
• desktop notification now once again correctly notifies of “No activity”
• updated Bulgarian translation

apart from that i decoupled the sqlite backend even further, so say if you would like to create your own time tracking app, you can at least reuse the models. the project is available via pypi here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/hamster-sqlite/

it’s being built from the same sources that hamster is, so it’s always fresh

News

January 16, 2013

7 Comments

hamster-time-tracker 1.02 out

Just tagged hamster 1.02, which is pretty much the extent of releasing hamster. You can grab a tarball from the tags page https://github.com/projecthamster/hamster/tags.

Please note: This release is not backwards compatible with GNOME 2.x (or rather it will work but there is no applet anymore)

The applet is dead, long live shell extension (available on extensions.gnome.org).

Details

This release does not add any new features and just tries to cope with the loss of the applet. Also the organisational changes i made (moving away from gnome and into github) were done so to avoid extinction of the project (even if slightly dormant, hamster is not being abandoned).  There are a few bug fixes here and there and some improvements to the command line however.

This is also the first release targetting GNOME v3+. The applet has been removed and recommended hamster remote is the shell extension, available on extensions.gnome.org.

• Project Hamster has detached from Gnome and thus we are resetting the versioning. The program name also has changed from hamster-applet to a more generic hamster-time-tracker
• Improvements in the command line. hamster-cli has been renamed to simply “hamster” and without parameters launches the day view. Run ”hamster –help” to get help on available commands. The executable also supports tab-completion to suggest actions as well as to look up activities and categories
• desktop notifications are back
• the notification tray interaction has been slightly improved (click to toggle)
• ~20 bug fixes https://github.com/projecthamster/hamster/issues?state=closed

A small step for humanity and a huge leap for hamster.  Happy using and fork us on github!

News

December 21, 2012

6 Comments

Release on Dec 20 2012, call to packagers and translators!

On Dec 20 i’ll be shipping a stable(r) version of project hamster. By shipping i mean the github repository will be tagged and there will be a targzipped package in the downloads section.

One big thing that is going to happen, is the renaming of the package. It used to be “hamster-applet” and now it will be “hamster-time-tracker“. This also allows me to abandon the GNOME versioning scheme and we start numbering hamster-time-tracker at 1.2.

Translators – the strings have stabilized and i don’t expect them to change in the next two weeks, so your love will be appreciated a lot by the folks using hamster. To submit a translation, simply fork the hamster project in github, perform changes in your forked repo and then create a pull request.

Packagers – i hope this finally marks hamster packages going away from git-timestamp packages. Future releases will be anounced here as well as in the g+ page

Hamster git users – follow these instructions to clean up previous hamster paths to avoid any confusion.

I’ll be updating release notes shortly, but this version is essentially all about putting hamster back on track after the numerous changes in gnome and the whole ubuntu departure.

Apart from that the command line interface has gotten quite a bit of love. The “hamster-cli” command has been dropped in favor of simply “hamster”. When run without params it will open the today’s view. Run “hamster –help” to find out the params and goodies. It also supports tab-completion.

Check out issues open and closed - for what has been fixed between here and us moving to github and what’s still on the list

Comments are welcome, so are rants, sobs and courses – hit me!

 

Ah yes, also mad props to all the flatterers for reminding me to keep going!

News

December 2, 2012

3 Comments

Hamster moving to github

Hamster code has been moved to https://github.com/projecthamster

The app is under “hamster” (the name might change but i think it’s ok). And you can also see shell-extension there. If you happen to be hosting any of the hamster extensions for other targets, you are more than welcome to transfer the ownership and i’ll get you on the team as well

Right now it’s just the code, but i plan to move over also bugs and start releasing versions there.

I would like to thank the GNOME foundation for including hamster in gnome 5 years ago. It gave the project unprecedented exposure and the army of translators made sure it is available in all the major languages. A huge thanks for that!

As for the reasoning:

The gnome infrastructure is functioning perfectly fine. Just it doesn’t have the horsepower that is driving github and can’t possibly compete with all the development there. Apart from that, the hope that hamster will become core part of the desktop didn’t come true.

Also i think hamster will benefit from a more relaxed release pace and not having to comply to any of the freezes or dealing with any of the bureaucracy that simply doesn’t apply for a project code of which at the moment of writing 98%  consists of work done by 2 contributors.

News

September 13, 2012

4 Comments

At campus party Berlin

Hey – i’ll be attending all 4 days in campus party berlin (http://www.campus-party.eu/) – so give me a shout if any of you hamster friends are around and would enjoy a chat on ‘tings and ‘tings (not necessarily just hamster)

News

August 22, 2012

5 Comments

Extension now live on extensions.gnome.org

 

You still need to install hamster from sources but this is a big step forward.

Go get it!

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/425/project-hamster-extension/

 

After installing reload the page and you will get to prefs too, in case you don’t like hamster right in the middle of the panel or would like to just have the icon.

It’s still work in (slow) progress of course.

News

August 13, 2012

3 Comments