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Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

Issues and other GH infrastructure is arguably a bigger problem. That metadata is locked within the Github silo with no easy way to export it elsewhere.

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This is indeed the crux of the problem. I've been thinking about this a lot (and I wouldn't be surprised if it exists already), we need a decentralised method of storing issues and other things inside our git repos.

I know of at least one solution: https://bifax.org/

Great link, thanks! I've been looking for something like this.

Also, the workflow on Github is one many people like, and it differs a bit if you have to use git "the old fashioned way". Not that it's hard or impossible, but it differs. I can't imagine explaining the GitHub-less workflow to my colleges..

\*colleague.

it's an issue for issues, but wikis at least are also git repos : https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pag...

If you think about it, there's no particular reasons why the metadata can't live in (and be tracked by) the repo itself.

Issues could live in /issues. Simple command-line (or GUI) tools could edit them. I'm thinking in particular of how password-store[0] makes tracking history in a git repo invisible: it Just Works™.

Discussions could live in /discussions, stored in something like RFC822 format. Again, simple CLI (or GUI, if you swing that way) tools could manipulate this easily.

A wiki can, again, live in the same repo.

PRs are a little different, since they really do need to live outside the repo. But what is a PR other than someone saying, 'hey, please pull my branch into yours'?

[0] https://www.passwordstore.org/

PRs and other things could also just live in a "shadow repo". Even if just by convention.

You have a `Product` repo and a `Product-meta` repo.

The biggest issue I have with using git as a truly decentralized system is remote management. Unless you want to be manually futzing with remotes on every single client and pushing/fetching from others correctly, you need some kind of central server.

I really think there is a hole here for a product that works with git underneath, but gives a nice easy way to manage all that complexity.

Like GitHub?

I missed a word there, I meant a "decentralized way of managing all that complexity"!

https://github.com/neithernut/git-dit provides a distributed issue tracker inside git, without cluttering the repository with unneeded files and also gives the possibility for having tree-like conversation, referencing issues and so on.

Unfortunately, no non-cli frontend exists right now (feel free to build one, shouldn't be complicated). Also some convenience is still missing, but could easily be integrated.

What's also missing is a way to give users of the tool access to a repository where they can submit issues (which then could also be used by a web/gui frontend for the tool). This is not the domain of git-dit itself, but a solution needs to be found. One idea would be a publish repo (where everyone can push) which automatically does some sanity-verification on the issues and forwards them to the maintainers repository... or something like that.

Also, https://github.com/vitiral/artifact/ is a really nice tool to do planning of an application or library inside a git repository. I am currently starting using it in iamg (https://imag-pim.org) and it is really wonderful. The author currently does a reimplementation of its core functionality to make it even more powerful.

There are several attempts at tracking issues inside a repository. What we really need to sell the concept, though, I think is one that can reasonably sync with GitHub Issues. GitHub Issues are a reasonable front end for issue reporting for casual and non-technical users and if you can interoperate with them you don't have to reinvent that basic CMS.

Every now and then I sketch ideas on the subject, but haven't yet gotten someone to pay me to build it. ;)

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