gisu (decentralized issue tracking in git)

Git repositories are typically accompanied with various issue trackers that allow developers to communicate on various topics regarding the code.

While practical, this creates a peculiar disunion of interests: Although the git repositories are decentralized and may be easily migrated as a whole with complete history, the issue trackers are not, and are (increasingly often) vendor-locked to particular platforms and communication media.

As a remedy, the issues may be stored directly in git code (even in primitive forms such as TODO comments), together with history, commented development of the problem, and possible “discussion”. That solution is technically sound, but grossly impractical due to lack of sufficiently powerful tooling and user interfaces, mainly a good visual (or even “conversational”) tool to browse and manage such issues, use them in a issue-tracker-like interface, or somehow submit issues without an actual write access to the repository.

This is a good topic for several master theses or a software project, possibly connected to other projects. In particular, there are many possible sub-projects:

• reliably extracting the “issues” from whole repositories and linking them together to create explorable issue-histories
• indexing the issue information for fast display in a user interface
• implementing the user-interface front-ends for commandline, TUIs and browsers
• providing a suitable decentralized mechanism for incoming contributions (in our case bug reports) from users
• somehow re-using that mechanism for implementing decentralized “pull request” management

The codename for the project group is currently gisu, as a relatively commandline-friendly shortcut for “git issues”.

In case you arrived here via the QR code on a poster and you are interested in working on such topic, drop an e-mail to the expected supervisor.