Skip to content

tasklib crashes/hangs when parsing historical dates from Taskwarrior 3.x (SQLite backend) #136

Description

@Sci-fer

Hey guys,

Ran into an edge case where tasklib completely fails to parse a task if it contains an older historical creation date.
How it happens:

If you manually force an old date on a task using task edit (for example, setting Created: 1979-07-14 00:00:00), Taskwarrior 3.x saves it to the SQLite database just fine.

However, when a frontend library like vit tries to initialize and read the tasks via tasklib, it throws this validation error and gets stuck in an infinite loop:
Plaintext

'300769200' is not a valid date in the '' format.

It looks like the internal date parser chokes on the smaller Unix timestamp integer (300769200) coming out of the modern Taskwarrior 3 SQLite backend, treating it as malformed text.

Changing the date back to a modern timestamp via the standard CLI (task modify entry:2026-07-01) fixes the issue immediately, but it would be great if tasklib had a defensive check or fallback format handler here to stop the parser from completely dying on older dates.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Fields

    No fields configured for issues without a type.

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions