Comment by Izkata
6 hours ago
There was a small surge in popularity in distributed git issue trackers a bit over a decade ago, and all of them had some sort of problem baked in to the design that made them not very good.
Two weeks ago I had listed out the problems I could remember offhand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47956979
It sounds like there's intentionally no attempt to handle the last one (that this is by devs for devs), and points 3 and 4 might be addressed somehow since it mentions syncing automatically. Does it store data separate from git to avoid the first two?
Thanks for input. Interesting list. A few notes on that:
- Issue state is not tied to commits in the checked out repo. Events live in append-only user-scoped logs and are materialized independently of the checked out branch, so switching branches does not change issue state. This is solved with git worktrees.
- Epiq keeps state in a dedicated state branch and does not put issue data into normal code history. The working branch stays clean.
- Sync uses normal git push/pull semantics.
- Multi-user conflicts are prevented because each user writes only to their own immutable event log file. You never co edit a file. Logs converge state in memory from the combined event stream. There’s no shared mutable issue document being edited.
- The non-developer distribution can be addressed with exported state .md files (with the board as ascii). They are currently not generated automatically, but you can generate them at will. [edit - addition: Considerable effort has also been put into making the tool accessible to non-technical people, so there is auto completion, hints, a command palette with descriptions of each command, arrow key navigation and so on. It is my hope that anyone can pick it up rapidly. And a web interface could definitely be crafted for that usecase]
You don't need to put it on the Web to be able to leverage the World Wide Wruntime.
Epiq looks to be written in TypeScript and distributed as JS via NPM. You know what excels at executing JS? The browser.
If you want to actually address the usability problems—then create a CONTRIBUTING.html—linked from the README, that users are instructed to double-click to open (i.e. launch in the browser on any sanely configured system). From there, they can/should be able to load the project either by pointing to it with a filepicker-based workflow that's the same as VSCode's "Open Folder…" workflow, or by dragging and dropping the source tree into the browser window. If you do it right, then this should immediately present them with a browser-based UI for poring over and interacting with all the Epiq data in the repo—down to the Git commands to execute to integrate changes into the Epiq "database".
It's beyond baffling that so many programmers who are nominally JS developers thumb their noses at writing standards-compliant code and instead insist on coding directly against Node's proprietary APIs.
I am writing a tool with git tracking. Here's how I tackled these. I store the issues in a work tree inside the git repo called .tasks
This work tree is not included as part of the standard repo
Then I have two commands, a save and restore. These commands create a remote branch inside the git repo called tasks and updates it with the contents of the .tasks work tree. This remote branch only contains tasks no normal code.
Restore takes the contents of the remote branch and downloads it back to the locally created .tasks work tree
Save and restore are manual processes, but the tool I wrote triggers a save whenever a merge to main occurs.