Lost Website

I’m very bad at keeping track of the time I spend working. This tends to require manual input, and something to remind me of doing the input. The later part is where I usually fail and lose interest. This meant that last week I had to input a year worth of timekeeping data in a few hours in a web application for that purpose.

This is not a problem as opaque as it might seem to some people. We use timekeeping at work to keep track of how much time are spent doing specific projects and not to keep a precise account of who is working or not at specific time.

The only place where that data is consigned is in out revision control systems, Mercurial. It has a detailed log of the data that was commited inside a repository and, an explanation why if the commit message was good. Scanning each repository (all 72 of them) with the default log command output would have been undoable.

Luckily, Mercurial has a lesser known feature which allows users to present log data data in a more terse way that the default. This is the --template switch, which is pretty well explained in Mercurial manual.

The command I’m using in the script bellow is something like that:

hg log --template "{date|shortdate} {author|email} {rev}"

Here is an excerpt of the output of this command.

...
2009-09-09  fdgonthier@kryptiva.com 1934
2009-09-21  fdgonthier@kryptiva.com 1935
2009-09-21  fdgonthier@kryptiva.com 1936
...

So this shows some commit I have done in a specific project during the month of september in 2009. It was then trivial to extract that data from all the repositories to see what I was working on at what date. The following script loops around all my repositories and extract from the log the dates in 2009 where I have commited something. Note that I have added another field in the template, which is the name of the directory containing the Mercurial repository. This will be used to distinguish between projects in the step after the data is obtained.

#!/bin/sh

for i in $(find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | cut -c 3-); do
  if [ -e $i/.hg ]; then
    echo "Churning $i"
    (cd $i; \
       hg log \
         --template "{date|shortdate}  $i {author|email} {rev}\n" |\
      grep -E "^2009.*(fdgonthier)") > ~/churn/$i
  fi
done

From the files churn directory it’s then trivial to get a picture of everything that was worked on all through the year. Just cat the file together and sort the whole set of lines by date.

> cd ~/churn && cat * | sort | less
...
2009-03-03  bar-daemon fdgonthier@kryptiva.com 1803
2009-03-03  bar-daemon fdgonthier@kryptiva.com 1804
2009-03-04  libfoo fdgonthier@kryptiva.com 5
2009-03-04  libfoo fdgonthier@kryptiva.com 6
2009-03-04  bar-daemon fdgonthier@kryptiva.com 1805
2009-03-04  bar-deamon fdgonthier@kryptiva.com 1806
...

This will be as accurate as you keep your repositories clean. For example, it might be difficult to extract only the changesets you did if you did not pay attention to correctly configuring your default commit name. It happened to me in some contexts. I also had to use the revision number of the log to the content of some commits because I could not remember to what subproject they were attached.

This is not something you want to have to do. It’s much more accurate and easy to properly feed the timetracking program on a daily basis. There is no excuse not do to it properly, but if you tend to forget that kind of thing, this trick can help.