alt Hacker NewsI think this is made for an audience who find it obvious. "Why would you do it any other way" would be more interesting: There is a weird divide between git supported features on one hand and pull requests/ merge requests/ patch lists/ issues/ bug trackers etc. If everything was supported in git all these features would be interoperable between forges like github, bitbucket and gitea, forgejo.
Not only interoperability but backups, tooling, distributed workflows and everything in between would work consistently and the same way.
That said, I cannot count the times this concept was brought up and tried to make work but despite how much i love the idea in theory, i have yet to see a way it could work in practice.
Some of the issues: - no universal agreement on exact schema, feature set and workflows, do the competing implementations break each other? if its not interoperable why even bother vs just using an external solution
- how to handle issues not associated to one specific repo or to multiple repos, splitting repos etc.
- how to not confuse devs seeing issue branches or wherever the actual data is stored in the repo
- how to best make this usable to non devs
The list goes on
> "Why would you do it any other way" would be more interesting:
That's the interesting question. Normally a bug tracker would basically be a SQL application. When you move it into a Git repo you lose that and now you have to think about how to represent all that relational data in your repository. It gets annoying. This is why for Fossil it's such a trivial thing to do: Fossil repositories _are_ relational and hosted on an RDBMS (SQLite3 or PG). If you don't have a SQL then referential integrity is easy to break (e.g., issues that refer to others that don't know they're being referred to), and querying your issue database becomes a problem as it gets huge because Git doesn't really have an appropriate index for this.
What one might do to alleviate the relational issues is to just not try to maintain referential integrity but instead suck up the issues from Git into a local SQLite3 DB. Then as long as there are no non-fast-forward pushes to the issues DB it's always easy to catch up and have a functional relational database.