In ALAP scheduling, today is not a valid end date if no dates are assigned

[Chris Nelson]

Any unspecified date defaults to today but if no dates are specified, an ALAP schedule works backwards from the end, gives the last task today as a due date then works into the past. But we can't work in the past so that's not a great choice.

Unfortunately, we don't know the makespan of the project before starting so we can't easily say "today plus makespan" as the starting point.

This should be fixed, even though I don't know how right now.

[falkb]

Replying to ChrisNelson:

Any unspecified date defaults to today but if no dates are specified, an ALAP schedule works backwards from the end, gives the last task today as a due date then works into the past. But we can't work in the past so that's not a great choice.

Any news from this front? At present the chart is quite unusable for ALAP because of that computed start date in the past.

Unfortunately, we don't know the makespan of the project before starting so we can't easily say "today plus makespan" as the starting point.

This should be fixed, even though I don't know how right now.

Well, a known starting point can be the milestone if a date is set for it. And it is set here. So from the milestone date it could traverse backwards through the tickets depencency chain. Setting this start date, it looks like a small change.

[falkb]

Replying to falkb:

Well, a known starting point can be the milestone if a date is set for it. And it is set here. So from the milestone date it could traverse backwards through the tickets depencency chain. Setting this start date, it looks like a small change.

I solved this special case with the patch applied to #10127.