We are preparing a "triaging" system where new pull requests are tagged with labels describing what they need to move forward. E.g. #needs-test, #needs-better-patch, #needs-documentation. This way any committer will be able to look at their request and immediately know what, if anything, is needed to get the pull request moving.
The problem is that GitHub doesn't make it very easy to tag pull requests, and when you manage to do so it is really hard to view the results. Technically every pull request already has/is an issue, but you just really can't tell from the web UI.
For instance this pull request/issue has 5 labels and an assigned committer. But I have no idea how you would figure that out from just looking at it:
https://github.com/cappuccino/cappuccino/pull/1353
So a while ago I wrote a little bot that creates proper companion tracking issues for each pull request.
https://github.com/aljungberg/cappbot
A bot feels a bit hacky, so before going down that route we reached out to GitHub to see if they would improve their UI for our use case. That was about a month ago.
Alexander
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Best,
Mike
>> Google Groups "Cappuccino& Objective-J Development List" group. To
> I seem to recall we had a similar discussion some months ago (maybe a year?). I thought the upshot of that discussion was that github was not going to have exactly the tools we needed to track issues in a "complete" fashion any time soon. Perhaps we can put the system into place using comments on the pull requests for the time being?
>
Labels are more powerful than comments since they are consistent and can be checked at a glance. When you want to know "what needs to happen for this pull request to move forward?" labels will provide a single, clear answer to that question. You don't have to read and interpret a potentially long comment thread. (CappBot uses comments to draw attention to the issue it created though.)
We did have a similar discussion before and back then I also contacted GitHub. For various reasons we thought we would have a better chance of being heard this time around.
Alexander
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Mike
> I talked to someone at Github about it a couple days ago and they thought that we could add labels using the API, and see them in the web interface. Have we checked recently?
>
Sure, and you can do that in the list view on GitHub.com as well.
The problem is that you can't view the labels in the pull request so your changes are invisible for all intents and purposes.