git-bug VS git-appraise

Unfortunately github appears to be actively breaking the ability to use git-bug on large repositories (like nixpkgs):

https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/issues/749#issuecomme...

True but getting less true by the day:

https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

Only not having access to https://todo.sr.ht made me to recognize fully, that I don’t have any access to it. https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug suddenly looks much more interesting.

Neither do the issues support. But there is git-bug [0].

[0]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

As a sort of spiritual successor to git-appraise, I've been working on git-bug[1] which support issues and will at some point support kanban and code review. There is a few notables improvements:

- CRDT-like reusable data structure [2][3] for true p2p workflow and easily create new entities (code review ...)

- bidirectional bridges to github, gitlab ... to ease the transition or just use git-bug as a complement of those platform

- CLI, terminal UI and web UI, for different taste and integrate into your tooling/workflow

[1]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

[2]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/blob/master/doc/model...

[3]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/blob/master/entity/da...

> but that is for the development of the platform and network of Gitopia. For the end user the workflows remain almost the same for collaboration.

I have to disagree here. Accidental complexity in a system can have severe downstream impacts on end users, whether that be in the form of poor performance, unreliability, or just slow update cycles. It's not something you can paper over and completely hide from the user.

> Along with this the blockchain layer layer offers immutable, transparent and tamper proof versioning of code

Tamper-proof can be accomplished natively by signing [0]. receive.denyNonFastForwards and receive.denyDeletes[1] can be used to make a git repository immutable. Git commits are also already content-addressable. And transparency is achieved by just having the repo available for people to clone.

> along with the collaboration meta and augments the current collaboration flow

Could this augmentation not be accomplished by storing the collaboration information in the repo under a set of special-purpose branches? Like git-bug[2] or git-issue[3]? Coupled with GPG signatures and you've got your immutability, too!

> Along with this it enables us to provide a novel means to incentivize open-source contributions along with fostering a more decentralized approach for governance (even for projects), every token holder could have a say in the decision making, reducing the risk of undue influence by a single party, hence eliminating centralized control.

This one I'll grant you, but it's by far the least compelling aspect of the project to me. I don't think we're going to solve the centralization of GitHub by centralizing on a new plutocracy, I'd much rather see efforts towards full decentralization. There's nothing inherent to Git that requires that we all use the same set of servers.

[0] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work

[1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Configura...

[2] https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

[3] https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue

Regarding the issues, there are some projects like git-bug https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug trying to embed these sorts of meta-work into git.

Probably git-bug is closer to what Fossil does: It uses Git as a storage engine, and can coexist with your code in the same physical repository, but the issues don't actually show up as source files. Instead, each issue is a special branch (buried in refs so it won't clutter up git branch) that has zero common ancestry with anything else. So in theory you can poke at it with Git, but really, the Git under the hood is mostly an implementation detail, and as long as you interact with those files through the tool, it guarantees you won't have merge conflicts.

You might be interested by git-bug and https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/blob/master/doc/model..., which seems to be exactly what you describe. (Disclaimer: author).

git-appraise[1] implements that concept. From Google, no less.

I've never used it, or seen it used in the wild, but it always seemed intriguing, and like the obvious approach. The web UI traction is far greater for this to have any serious usage, but I wonder if Git had that ability from the start, if the web UI concept would've taken off as it did.

[1]: https://github.com/google/git-appraise

I believe their docs cover the scenario of reviewing someone's code by pushing your review to the git repo, and others can use `git appraise list` to see open pull requests.

https://github.com/google/git-appraise/blob/master/docs/tuto...

A trivial git-hook could be setup for automating email notifications.

I know about Google’s gerrit. I now found https://github.com/google/git-appraise, there seems to be a plethora on the issue and pr tracking side.

Then the other day there was a generic/abstraction layer to write CI that abstracte over gitlab, circle ci, and GitHub actions (maybe more). I suppose all that’s left is to get some api tokens somewhere and go?

Experimenting with distributed issue trackers in git was popular in the early 2010s, there were a whole bunch of different implementations people came up with for git. Most of them died out though, there were typically a few problems - this is what I remember offhand from experimenting with a whole bunch of them:

* Some of them make a mess of some part of git; one of them put its info in separate git branches to ensure changes were always pushed/pulled even without a special push/pull command for the issue tracker.

* At least one of them kept their info in the repo in a dot-prefixed directory and auto added/committed the file as changes were made; this meant a single issue could be in different statuses depending on which branch you were on and there was no overarching view.

* The rest effectively ran in parallel to the git repo, pushing and pulling their data within it but requiring their own commands to do so, so it was totally possible to clone the repo and not get the issues.

* Most of them didn't have a non-repo way to track issues, for project managers and such. One did have a webview that ran from a repo, but it was up to you to figure out how to keep it in sync with the comments/etc devs were putting in their copies of the issue tracker.

Sibling mentions git-bug, a few others:

https://github.com/aaiyer/bugseverywhere (I think this is one of the original ones)

https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue

https://github.com/neithernut/git-dit

https://github.com/google/git-appraise (I think this one is newest and I probably never tried it)