Poor Man's Issue Tracker

This is a poor man's issue tracker. It's a loosely defined set of conventions for using the filesystem as an issue tracker. Tools (such as these) can be written to write or read or write directories following this convention. Track the whole thing with git, and you can call it a distributed issue tracker.

The conventions defined here can be parsed into a database (which should be gitignored if using something like sqlite) for efficiency of querying in an http frontend to an issues directory.

Issue Conventions

There should be a top level directory named issues.

Any subdirectory of the issues/ directory is considered an issue. The directory name should be a short human readable description of the issue and can be considered the issue title. Dashes should be interpreted as spaces and n > 1 dashes should be interpreted as n-1 dashes when converting directory name to a human readable issue title.

You can put any files you want in an issue subdirectory, but there are some basic conventions that should be followed for the following files (and you should consider using git annex instead of git for tracking any large files):

Description: This file contains free form text describing the issue. It can be interpreted as markdown format.

Status: The first line of this file, after trimming beginning/end of line whitespace defines the status of the issue. It can be arbitrary text and the status value is case-insensitive.

      If there is a colon in the text, the part before the first 
      colon is considered the status, and the part after the value 
      of the status.

      Some examples statuses might be `Open`, `Assigned:driusan`, or `Wtf`

      Only the first line defines the status, but tools should preserve
      the rest of the file when modifying it. A user might manually 
      include, for instance, information on why this status is defined 
      for this issue.

Priority: The first line of this file, after trimming beginning/end of line whitespace, should be interpreted as a number which defines the Priority of this issue. Higher numbers have higher priority. Negative numbers (or real numbers) are perfectly valid. Interpretation of complex numbers is left as an exercise to the reader.

        Only the first line defines the priority, but tools should
        preserve the rest of the file when modifying it. A user might 
        manually include, for instance, information on why this priority 
        is assigned to this issue.

blockedby: This subdirectory of an issue contains files where the file name is the name of some other bug blocking this issue. It can optionally be a symlink, but it's equally valid to just be an empty file (or a file containing text, such as a reason why the other issue blocks.)

         Commandline tools (or http implementations) should ensure these 
         names are updated in other issues pointing to this if an issue is 
         renamed.

tags: This subdirectory contains empty files with tags that can be used to categorize this issue.