Git-dit Alternatives

git-dit reviews and mentions

• Utterances – a lightweight comments widget built on GitHub issues
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Nov 2021

  I think he meant just the network effects of a social platform. Github has more people in them so there are more people interacting with repositories hosted on Github.

  I wish that somehow people carried identity across Github / Gitlab / Gitea / other services. Like, a federated issue tracker. Or otherwise that the issues themselves were easily movable between platforms, with no lock-in. But the incumbent platforms rarely want something like this.

  An alternative is to eschew platform issues entirely, and use decentralized issue comments hosted as Git repositories, like https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue or https://github.com/neithernut/git-dit or https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug - I think that Gitlab should offer integration with one of them. I mean: both allowing to export issues and PRs into a Git branch, and allowing people to comment on issues and PRs by pushing to a Git branch.

• The Return of Fancy Tools
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 May 2021

  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)