todoman: Breaking changes in v4.0.0

The configuration format is changing with release 4.0.0. We currently depend on an unmaintained library for configuration. It’s not currently in a working state, and while some distributions are patching it, setting up a clean environment is a bit non-trivial, and the situation will only degrade in future.

The changes in format are be subtle, and also come with an intention to add further extensibility in future. Configuration files will be plain python. If you don’t know Python don’t worry, you don’t need to know Python.

I’ll take my own config as a reference. The pre-4.0.0 format is:

[main]
path = ~/.local/share/calendars/*
time_format = '%H:%M'
default_list = todo
humanize = true
startable = true

The 4.0.0 version would look like this:

path = "~/.local/share/calendars/*"
time_format = "%H:%M"
default_list = "todo"
humanize = True
startable = True

Key differences:

• The [main] header is no longer needed.
• All strings must be quoted (this was previously optional).
• True and False start with uppercase.
• Using yes or on is no longer valid; only True and False are valid.

That’s basically it. This lets up drop the problematic dependency, and we don’t actually need anything to read the config: it’s just python code like the rest of todoman!

For those users who are python developers, you’ll note this gives some interesting flexibility: you CAN add any custom python code into the config file. For example, you can defined the path programatically:

def get_path() -> str:
    ...


path = get_path

There are no limitations here, but if you break something, you get to keep both pieces.