alt Hacker NewsThere 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]