A very simple way to track ideas, todos, or bugs as files inside a Subversion or Git repository.

[NOTE: I implemented this quickly when I started using bare-bones git in order to have simple, command-line based way to add issues to a project. Since then I have moved to use GitHub, GitLab and similar systems instead which have their own, web-based issue trackers and are much more powerful. I am happy if you find this script useful, but it is unlikely that it will receive any more updates or features. I will happily accept merge requests though. Otherwise, use however you please.]

The idea of this simple script is that for small projects it can be too much overhad to set up a issue tracker and one would just like to keep the ideas, todos and bugs with the project repository.

The file issues.pl is a simple script that simplifies doing this and working with the following conventions:

• The root of the subversion or git repository contains a directory "issues" which contains one file for each idea, todo or bug
• The file name for an issue contains the creation date, sequence number per date, issue type and user name: 20141221-1-idea-jsmith.issue
• Closed issues are moved to the directory "issues/closed". All issues in the "isses" directory are open.
• Each issue file can contain arbitrary text, separated into arbitrary "fields"
• A field has a name and a content
• A field name must start at the beginning of a line, consist of just ascii letters, numbers and _ and must start with a letter. It must be followed by a colon and a blank
• The content of a field can be arbitrary text that is not a field name
• The following fields are known and should be used:
  • summary: a one line summary of the issue
  • priority: something of the form m/n where m >=0 and m<=n and n and m are integers, e.g. 2/10, meaning 2 of 10. This reflects the importance to deal with the issue.
  • severity: same format as priority. This reflects how big the problem is (usually only used for bugs, not ideas or todos)
  • due: a date in the format yyyymmdd or yyyy-mm-dd
  • comments: detailed comments describing the issue. The comment field can be arbitrarily structured as long as it does not contain something that looks like a field name. #

This can all be done manually, the script issues.pl simply tries to make some of the most frequent actions easier and less error-prone.

1. clone the git repository somewhere: git clone https://github.com/johann-petrak/simple-issues-tracker.git
2. Do one of the following things to make the script issues.pl accessible as a command:
3. copy the file to a directory that is already in your PATH, optionally renaming to a command name that you like better
4. OR add the directory you created by cloning to your PATH
5. OR create a symbolic link to issues.pl in a directory that is already in your PATH, e.g. cd <mybindir>; ln -s <dirwheregotclonewasdone>/simple-issues-tracker/issues.pl sit will make the script accessible as the sit command

Run issues.pl -h to show usage information.