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karelz / GitHubIssues

Tools for tracking GitHub issues

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Web interface for GH query notifications

karelz opened this issue · comments

commented

Great UI: https://octobox.io/ ... could we piggyback on it?
Maybe inject another source of notifications (based on queries and settings like label/milestone changes per query)?

It would also allow us to enable notifications for all issues in your queries, without explicitly subscribing to the issues (which is pain).

Additional ideas:

  • Team per-repo queries (for people with write permissions)
  • Personal queries
  • Option to monitor any label/milestone changes in a query

GitHub issue tracking in insufficient for daily developer job on large repo like CoreFX, CoreCLR, Roslyn, VSCode, etc.

GitHub provides:

  • Notifications about comments (incl. Closing) for issues you subscribed to.
  • Notifications about comments where you are mentioned explicitly.
  • Unusable for large repos: Notifications for all issues in the repo = madness, no one uses that

Missing features:

  1. Notifications about new issues/PRs in your area -- supplemented by email alerts from command line tool
  2. Notifications about comments in your area (when you didn't manually subscribe to the issue)
    • Scenario: As area owner, you want to be auto-subscribed to all issues which are currently in your area(s), so that you don't have to do it manually. Bonus: Works also on 'Closed' issues when customers start commenting and asking on them (it happens quite often).
  3. Notifications about label/milestone changes for issues in your area.
    • Scenario: As key area owner, you want to make sure the bugs don't get triaged out/marked in harmful way silently, without you knowing.
  4. Notifications about label/milestone changes for issues you are subscribed to.
    • Scenario: As interested person, you want to make sure the bugs don't get triaged out/marked in harmful way silently, without you knowing.
  5. Notifications about PRs which touch files/directories you monitor
    • Scenario: As owner of source code, you want to know when anyone makes changes to them.
  6. Option to choose which notifications are via web UI and/or email alerts (like on GitHub)

Most of the missing features [2], [3] [4] and [5] are not smoothly doable in current form of the alerts tool. The tool reached its limits.
We need to invest in new tooling (2.0) ideally with web-based UI, similar to OWA email and https://octobox.io. More details on architecture and requirements are here: #9

Similar requirements are for any large repo - VSCode, CoreCLR, Roslyn, Google repos, etc. Everyone creates their own one-off half-baked tooling. It would be nice to habe just one which works for all (open source even).

commented

It will likely require data delta pulling - #142

commented

Architecture:

  1. Database to mirror all GH issues changes
    • New data is pulled via GitHub APIs every ~10 mins -- see #142 for details
    • Database backend captures each issue timeline: Azure tables (the schema is pretty trivial with 1-2 indexes)
    • Feature: Import/onboard new repo (i.e. download all info about the repo)
  2. Database to store user preferences (queries settings, etc.)
    • Optional: If you change your query or add a new one, you should get the option to generate its notifications for a time period.
  3. Database exposes generalized notifications (e.g REST API) - push notifications
    • Optional/Future: Expose the notifications as a service for existing solutions like https://octobox.io (similar to GitHub APIs)
  4. Create web UI which has simple email / http://octobox.io look & feel.
    • Functions required:
      • Delete notification
      • Mark notification/issue as follow up
      • Unsubscribe from query-notifications (in cases you didn't subscribe on GitHub explicitly) - similar to 'ignore thread' in email client
    • Enable simple per-repo customization:
      • List of queries to watch/get notifications for (default query is entire repo)
      • Per-query options:
        • Notification for every new issue in the query -- note: Today even external folks want this, they work around it today by channeling notifications to Twitter, e.g. @corefxissues and @dotnetissues
        • Notification for every gone issue in the query
        • Notification for every comment on any issue in the query
        • Notification for milestone change for any issue in the query
        • Notification for label change for any issue in the query
      • Per-notification choice to be via email or only in web UI (or both) -- ideally should be configurable per query & notification kind combo
    • TODO: Provide mockup

Proof-of-concept -- key components:

  1. Verify capability of GitHub APIs necessary to pull issue database updates (see #142 for details from GitHub folks)
  2. Design database service API for front-end consumption (follow GitHub REST? APIs model for easier consumption from other front-ends)
  3. Define Azure tables schema (assuming Azure SQL is overkill + costly) (@ChadNedzlek's recommendation)
  4. Validate UI JS framework - AngularJS 1 (@ChadNedzlek's recommendation - keep just 1!) (or @terrajobst's recommendation as he did bunch of web sites with JS)
  5. Design authentication (reuse existing components/technology from mc.net)

Tips & tricks:

  • Dogfood ASP.NET Core.
  • Database can be mocked by existing data on disk (\clrmain\public\GitHubIssuesTracker\Data)

Execution plan:

  1. Proof-of-concept - 1-2w
  2. Minimal viable product - cost: TBD
  3. Make it OSS project, let other large-repo teams to chip in and help share the cost (e.g. VSCode, non-MS), or interns / MVPs
commented

Additional features for web UI:

  1. Query reports - to provide copy-pastable list of bugs into email/OneNote - supported today via command line tool
  2. Query diff report - new/gone/same issues between 2 data points - supported today via command line tool
  3. Query history report - number of bugs / incoming/gone - supported today via command line tool
  4. multi-repo queries - burndown graphs, etc. - supported as .csv output today via command line tool
  5. Fancy graphs for query burndowns?
commented

List of teams who requested the tooling:

  1. Roslyn team (@jinujoseph) needs multi-repo burndowns - https://github.com/dotnet/core-eng/issues/706#issuecomment-297231268 (missing feature in current tooling - catch up on history)
  2. ASP.NET team (@DamianEdwards) needs multi-repo burndowns - https://github.com/dotnet/core-eng/issues/706#issuecomment-297231268 (missing feature in current tooling - catch up on history)
  3. Community member (@cwe1ss) would like to monitor specific area (Tracing), but doesn't scale to monitor entire repo
    • I suspect it is true for many more community members who just didn't speak up (the top MVPs just monitor Twitter for new issues - they can't monitor new PRs in area)
    • Temporary solution: I added @cwe1ss to my email alerts, but it doesn't scale to too many people. Also the lack of configuration is bummer.
    • Feedback from @cwe1ss: this tool is awesome and very helpful! Thanks Karel!
commented

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