Auto-expiring TODO notes in Ruby (opens in new tab)

Might it not make sense to invert the parity of the environment variable and require its being set for do_by to be used? I imagine most would rather set an environment variable in their dev environment than ensure it gets set in every possible production instance... :/

As much as 'turning off asserts' is the classical style, that's more to do with the design of older instrumentation than the sanity of it.

Lovely language / solution mismatch.

Any compiled language would fit this much better - fail at compile time. Or in interpreted-o-world, at least do it at test time.

I guess it's just lovely when deployed, working, test-passing software suddenly starts failing on a server (all servers at once, globally), because someone added a TODO a few weeks ago.

Don't do that.

Some years ago I had the same idea and realized something like that with the C-Preprocessor in a C++-Codebase.

When did my Todo's expire? AFTER testing, just before a new release. With my idea of exipiring Todos I created a major pain in the butt for the team.

It would be different if some other "sort of" alarm would be raised when TODOs proliferate, but a failure in the code is not a good solution. (i.e. hook a todo checker into your contious build system, let the nightly build raise hell when there are too many todos - but do not fail the production code.)

So there may not be much awareness so this, but <strike>Ruby</strike> Rails (as noted below, the annotations or part of rails/rake) has this feature that you can add special annotations # TODO # FIXME # OPTIMIZE comments to you code, and "$ rake notes" to list them. it also allows you to have a custom annotations comments : For a full description, see : http://rubyquicktips.com/post/385665023/fixme-todo-and-optim...

Better to make a # DOBY annotation and modify the rake task to shame if the date passed. You could also add this metadata to the existing annotations. If you what to automate the shaming, write a guard gem to watch for these annotations.

Silly.

I fail to understand how the developer getting the surprising out-of-context (with regard to what the developer is currently doing) build failure due to time-bomb-TODO-comments suddenly is expected to experience an energy burst and fix the issue right then and there. After all, the developer didn't fix the issue when the comment was written!

I think this just leads the developer to either a) delete the comment or b) increase the due date.

Better to make it a NOOP and have an automated test that scans for it. Too much chance of exercising it in production otherwise.

Wouldn't this be much more suitable to do in an IDE or compiler? Raising exceptions during runtime seems the wrong approach to me. I wouldn't be suprised if this is possible and used in e.g. Mylyn.

Another idea would be to automatically create a task/bug/issue for every TODO created (which closes when the TODO is removed)

I'd see this with more value as a post-commit git hook. After a certain amount of time (or date specified) it would warn you that TODOs are about to expire, and either remove them or update the date. That way it can be project-wide and doesn't require execution.

I like it. It reminds me of a concept [1] I saw presented at Fluent Conf this year, called Sunset Tests. The idea is that when you write code which shouldn't be a permanent addition to the code base (for example, a poly fill for IE 7, or an A/B test), write a test that checks for the existence of that code and fails if it's still there past a certain date.

I wonder if the TODO method could dynamically generate a test case that does the same.

[1] Everything is a Polyfill: Automate Deleting Code for Front End Performance - Rachel Myers and Emily Nakashima

http://www.slideshare.net/eanakashima/everything-is-a-polyfi...

Horrible implementation approach. Mixing runtime exceptions with project management that you're not guaranteed to hit while testing? lol.

A pre-commit hook is the way to go,

* Post-commit: You'll always catch the exception, but you'll be able to commit expired TODOs

* Pre-commit: you'll have to explicitly change the expired TODOs either by removing them (irrelevant TODO, todo became todone through a refactor, etc.), or discussing a better end-date ... but either way, you're forced to address the expired TODO and not run the risk of committing expired TODOs nor not taking a test path that would miss the expired TODO exception

I started doing something much simpler: When working on a project I just create .todo files anywhere it makes sense. This way I can view, edit, add, and remove them very easily with simple shell commands.

I just enjoy the simplicity of `echo 'remember to test the milk' >> foo/.todo`.

Why a function? I hoped it would just parse comments.

This is excellent. I always fail to keep track on my TODOS in files. Very useful.