But that’s not what parent meant. Those things should be embedded in the git repository itself, in some kind of structure below the .git/ directory. That would indeed make the entire OSS ecosystem more resilient. We don’t need a myriad of incompatible git web GUIs, but a standard way of storing project management metadata alongside version control data. GitHub, Gitea, Gitlab, and this project could all store their data in there instead of proprietary databases, making it easy to migrate projects.
> Radicle’s predefined COB types are stored under the refs/cobs hierarchy. These are associated with unique namespaces, such as xyz.radicle.issue and xyz.radicle.patch, to prevent naming collisions.
This looks like an interesting approach. I have question, to avoid copy a large .git project, we have partial cloning and cloning depth. If `cobs` grows too large, how can we partially clone it? Like select issues by time range?
The COB types are located in the Stored Copy, you would still be able to partial clone the working copy repo without the issues and patches, with your current git commands.
There is a better explainer here: https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/protocol#storage-layout
What’s the alternative? That at least N projects cooperate and agree on a common design before they do the implementation? (Then maybe someone can complain about design-by-committee.)
I use Artemis, which was originally written for Mercurial but also supports Git. It stores issues inside a repo, so it doesn't care about where it's hosted and works completely offline without needing a Web browser. Issues are stored in Maildir format, which is widely supported standard that can be processed using off-the-shelf tools. For example, I write and comment on Artemis issues using Emacs message-mode (which was designed for Email), and I render issues to HTML using MHonArc (which was designed for mailing list archives).
I'm not claiming these tools are the best, or anything. Just that existing standards can work very well, and are a good foundation to build up UIs or whatever; rather than attempting to design something perfect from scratch.
> What’s the alternative? That at least N projects cooperate and agree on a common design before they do the implementation?
That would be ideal, yes. You should solicit comments from the greater community before setting the format in stone. But the very minimum would be to build on existing attempts at issues-in-git like [0] instead of reinventing the wheel unless you have a very very very good reason.
Yes! That's exactly what I would like to see - come together as a working group, create a PR on git itself, and implement standard support for issues, PRs, discussions, projects, votings, project websites, what-have-you. The community will take it from there.
The alternative to that would be the git project itself coming up with an implementation. They have reasonable experience working with the Kernel, and the creation of git itself seems to have worked reasonably well -- although I'm not sure I would want to use something Linus considers ergonomic :)
Ok. That could work if you found a group of people who are interested in such an all-in-one package. Gitlab is apparently working on a sort of cross-forge protocol (probably motivated by connecting Gitlab instances) and it seems that some Gitlab employees are working full time on the Git project. So those are candidates. You probably need a group which both have recognition within the project and are active enough to drive such a project forward without it fizzling out.
Without such a group you might just send a few emails to mailing list, get shrugs about how that plan “looks good” with little real interest, and then have to discuss this big plan in every future patch series that incrementally builds such a thing into Git itself. Mostly why such code should be incorporated and how it will pay off when it’s all ready.
The Git tool itself—and the project by extension—is per now very unopinioated about whole-project solutions like this. The workflow that they themselves use is very loosely coupled and pretty much needs bespoke scripting by individual contributors, which I guess is telling in itself.
I'd like to note here that Radicle has defined our own version of issue and patch management, but they're not necessarily required to be used as part of the protocol. The protocol only defines that any and all COBs will be stored and replicated under the `refs/cobs` hierarchy.
If someone wanted to come along and define a way to embed Fossil wikis/issues as a COB then they could be replicated on the Radicle network and it's then up to application developers to load and interpret that data.
I think this is cool because it essentially allows developers to extend the Radicle ecosystem easily and define new workflows! However, that does not avoid our XKCD problem stated above ;P But hey, sometimes that's the beauty of these things -- we're given the power to define our own workflows and not locked into something everyone complains about coughGitHub branches PR flowcough
Git is just a mechanism for storing plain-text data as a series of commits. The underlying data are just blobs of bytes. So all data is Git data and Radicle takes full advantage of that.
The "special" data in Git would be `refs/heads`, `refs/remotes`, `refs/tags`, and the lesser known `refs/notes`. Radicle doesn't touch those directly, we still allow the use of Git tooling for working with that data.
It then extends on top of these by use `refs/rad` and `refs/cobs` for storing Radicle associated data, using all of Git's mechanisms that it provides to do so.
I don't think I would agree. Well it depends exactly what you imagine.
There are probably an infinite and always growing and changing number of repo-adjacent things similar to the handful of added features that github currently tacks on to git.
I think it doesn't make sense for git, already complicated enough, to try to do all of that other related stuff, however related.
Maybe in fact git is already doing too much meaningful metadata work directly itself, and should instead try to switch it's current metadata into some kind of generic interface that other software could hook in to better?
So rather than git managing, say, issues, git just manages data. Not merely a db, it would facilitate associating high level feature data like issues and ci and conversations with low level commit data. An issue tracker would just be one of many clients using the interface.
git itself should probably not know very much about the data other than how it is associated to some commit. IE, the actual meaning of the data is either only in the consumer, or perhaps is some agreed standard that multiple consumers adhere to and understand, or perhaps comes with it's own schema definition like dtd or protobuf. Or all of the above, a paid product could have data only it understands, and other software could use standardized data, all stored in git at the same time. Multiple different consumers could use the same generic interface to their own data.
Because these add-on related functions are probably not universal or done being invented. Tomorrow there will be 5 new things you want to attach to a repo besides what github provides today, and so without even knowing what they are, that's how I know it's wrong for git to provide the features itself.
But managing the data without caring what the data is, that could totally be a new built in git function, where you give git itself one new function and interface, and an open-ended number of new feature-providing consumers all just use the same underlying git feature in whatever way they want.
Other than that the only other new thing I think that might be right to add to git itself is a proper way to manage large binary assets.
