This is the 21th iteration on what happened in the last four weeks in the imag project, the text based personal information management suite for the commandline.

imag is a personal information management suite for the commandline. Its target audience are commandline- and power-users. It does not reimplement personal information management (PIM) aspects, but re-uses existing tools and standards to be an addition to an existing workflow, so one does not have to learn a new tool before beeing productive again. Some simple PIM aspects are implemented as imag modules, though. It gives the user the power to connect data from different existing tools and add meta-information to these connections, so one can do data-mining on PIM data.

What happenend?

Well, as I said before, I have a really busy masters degree to do, so progress in imag slowed down a lot. Believe me or not, I don't like that. I want to continue to work on imag as much as possible, but right now, I just do not have enough time for it.

I have a plan, though.

But first, lets see what happenend in the last four weeks.

PRs/Issues

The following issues and PRs were touched in the last weeks:

• #764 initialized the work on imag-mail
• #838 bumped up the clap version
• #839 updated dependencies
• #840 works on bulk-import for imag-mail
• #841 is a bug report on the behaviour of imag link internal --list
• #842 fixes #841
• #843 fixes another small bug in a UI
• #844 fixes a typo
• #845 adds Makefile support for cargo-outdated

What will happen

Well, I cannot predict the future. As Christmas (and 33c3) is coming up, I don't know how much time I will have to work on imag.

But what I want to do: Shift my focus a bit. Before I had a kind of Shotgun-Approach: Implement everything, work on multiple things all the time. I will not do this anymore. In fact, I will move issues from the 0.3.0 release to 0.4.0 and so on, shift everything by one release. That will free the 0.3.0 release and I will focus on one goal in this release then: A scripting API.

I want to develop an imag library for writing scripts for imag. I think about Ruby, because that's a language I am familiar with. Another option would be Lua. I hope I can construct the scripting-API interface in a way so it can be re-used to write a Lua interface.

But that will it be for 0.3.0. Having a neat scripting API (not low-level but rather high-level) gives us the possibility to quickly write simple integrations with tools, for example to integrate mails, a wiki or something similar.

I hope that's a plan. 0.3.0 is due to March 2017 as far as I remember, so there's plenty of time for this.

My next post will be around mid-january 2017, so I think it is appropriate to wish you all a very fine Christmas and a good new year!

tags: #linux #open source #programming #rust #software #tools #imag