The project management features don’t have to live inside VCS, but it would be nice to sync them there or derive some of the primitive data structures there — comment trees, approvals, CI red/green results at integration time.
A project should encapsulate the code, how we got there, what we changed, and why we changed it.
The code is your HEAD, available as a working copy. How we got there is the stack of diffs that, when applied to an empty repository, accumulate to being the current HEAD. What we changed is more nuanced that just the diffs: It’s the commit messages explaining the diffs and adding context. If the diff changes an algorithm from n^2 to n then what we changed is the runtime complexity of x, which is good for reasons y and z.
Why we changed it is the bit that’s missing. Was this work originally from a bug report? Did real-life-n stay small for our first six months and has all of a sudden become much bigger? Who was involved in deciding this was the right thing to do, what did they say, and what other approaches did we think about? Which cat meme was deemed appropriate for the final approval of the change?
Right now, that stuff is all linked to from git but it’s not really a part of the workflow unless you remain inside GitHub’s or GitLab’s ecosystems. Seeing that in the underlying tool would be really cool.
A project should encapsulate the code, how we got there, what we changed, and why we changed it.
The code is your HEAD, available as a working copy. How we got there is the stack of diffs that, when applied to an empty repository, accumulate to being the current HEAD. What we changed is more nuanced that just the diffs: It’s the commit messages explaining the diffs and adding context. If the diff changes an algorithm from n^2 to n then what we changed is the runtime complexity of x, which is good for reasons y and z.
Why we changed it is the bit that’s missing. Was this work originally from a bug report? Did real-life-n stay small for our first six months and has all of a sudden become much bigger? Who was involved in deciding this was the right thing to do, what did they say, and what other approaches did we think about? Which cat meme was deemed appropriate for the final approval of the change?
Right now, that stuff is all linked to from git but it’s not really a part of the workflow unless you remain inside GitHub’s or GitLab’s ecosystems. Seeing that in the underlying tool would be really cool.