Hamster - The Gnome Time Tracker
Hamster is time tracking for individuals. It helps you to keep track of how
much time you have spent during the day on activities you choose to track.
This is the main repo. It is standalone (single module).
All other repositories -hamster-lib/dbus/cli/gtk- are part of the separate rewrite effort.
More context is given in the history section below.
Some additional information is available in the
wiki
and a static copy of the user documentation is online
here.
Installation
Backup database
This legacy hamster should be stable, and keep database compatibility with previous versions.
It should be possible to try a new version and smoothly roll back to the previous version if preferred.
Nevertheless, things can always go wrong. It is strongly advised to backup the database before any version change !
Locate the latest db
ls --reverse -clt ~/.local/share/hamster*/*.db
Backup the last file in the list.
Kill hamster daemons
When trying a different version, make sure to kill the running daemons:
# either step-by-step, totally safe
pkill -f hamster-service
pkill -f hamster-windows-service
# check (should be empty)
pgrep -af hamster
# or be bold and kill them all at once:
pkill -ef hamster
Install from packages
OpenSUSE
https://software.opensuse.org/package/hamster-time-tracker
Snap
Easy installation on any distribution supporting snap:
https://snapcraft.io/hamster-snap
Install from sources
Dependencies
Debian-based
Ubuntu (tested in 19.04 and 18.04)
sudo apt install gettext intltool python3-gi-cairo python3-distutils python3-dbus python3-xdg libglib2.0-dev
# and for documentation
sudo apt install gnome-doc-utils yelp
openSUSE
Leap-15.0 and Leap-15.1:
sudo zypper install intltool python3-pyxdg python3-cairo python3-gobject-Gdk
sudo zypper install gnome-doc-utils xml2po yelp
RPM-based
RPM-based instructions below should be updated for python3 (issue #369).
yum install gettext intltool dbus-python
Help reader
If the hamster help pages are not accessible ("unable to open help:hamster-time-tracker"),
then a Mallard-capable help reader is required,
such as yelp.
Download source
Git clone
If familiar with github, just clone the repo and cd into it.
Download
Otherwise, to get the master development branch (intended to be quite stable):
wget https://github.com/projecthamster/hamster/archive/master.zip
cd hamster
or a specific release:
# replace 2.2.2 by the release version
wget https://github.com/projecthamster/hamster/archive/v2.2.2.zip
cd hamster-2.2.2
Build and install
./waf configure build
# thanks to the parentheses the umask of your shell will not be changed
( umask 0022 && sudo ./waf install; )
The umask 0022 is safe for all, but important for users with more restrictive umask,
as discussed here.
Now restart your panels/docks and you should be able to add Hamster!
Uninstall
To undo the last install, just
sudo ./waf uninstall
Afterwards find /usr -iname hamster should only list unrelated files (if any).
Otherwise, please see the wiki section
Troubleshooting
Development
During development (As explained above, backup hamster.db first !),
if only python files are changed
(deeper changes such as the migration to gsettings require a new install)
the changes can be quickly tested by
# either
pgrep -af hamster
# and kill them one by one
# or be bold and kill all processes with "hamster" in their command line
pkill -ef hamster
python3 src/hamster-service.py &
python3 src/hamster-cli.py
Advantage: running uninstalled is detected, and windows are not called via
D-Bus, so that all the traces are visible.
Note: You'll need recent version of hamster installed on your system (or
this workaround).
Migrating from hamster-applet
Previously Hamster was installed everywhere under hamster-applet. As
the applet is long gone, the paths and file names have changed to
hamster. To clean up previous installs follow these steps:
git checkout d140d45f105d4ca07d4e33bcec1fae30143959fe
./waf configure build --prefix=/usr
sudo ./waf uninstall
Contributing
- Fork this project
- Create a topic branch -
git checkout -b my_branch - Push to your branch -
git push origin my_branch - Submit a Pull Request with your branch
- That's it!
See How to contribute for more information.
History
During the period 2015-2017 there was a major effort to
rewrite hamster
(repositories: hamster-lib/dbus/cli/gtk).
Unfortunately, after considerable initial progress the work has remained in alpha state
for some time now. Hopefully the effort will be renewed in the future.
In the meantime, this sub-project aims to pursue development of the "legacy" Hamster
code base, maintaining database compatibility with the widely installed
v1.04,
but migrating to Gtk3 and python3.
This will allow package maintainers to provide
new packages for recent releases of mainstream Linux distributions for which the old
1.04-based versions are no longer provided.
With respect to 1.04, some of the GUI ease of use has been lost, especially for handling
tags, and the stats display is minimal now. So if you are happy with your hamster
application and it is still available for your distribution, upgrade is not recommended
yet.
In the meantime recent (v2.2+) releases have good backward data compatibility and are
reasonably usable. The aim is to provide a new stable v3.0 release in the coming
months (i.e. early 2020).