Git Project Manager

• Goal
  • What you gain
  • What you lose
  • Principle
  • Why org-mode and not markdown?

Goal

The goal is to have most features that github provide but using only text files and git. Typically solve the problem that github is fully centralized.

• github centralized a lot of stuff which are metas infos out of your git project:
• have a unique URL to reference your project and be able to push your code to

• issue tracker

  • forum to discuss about issues
• code review
• ability to make pull requests
• github pages
• project/code discovery
• identification and trust

What you gain

• Perfectly self-hosted
• private
• keep history of meta infos about your projects (life of issues, etc…) in your repository
• text + git, no magic, if you don't want to use emacs with org-mode, just use notepad it will be perfectly fine.
• keep history of reviews inside your git repo
• the meta history doesn't pollute the project history

What you lose

• github login/identification
• github discoverability. It is up to you to share your work on search engines.
• you need to self host: you'll certainly need to buy a domain name, have a server somewhere to host a git repo.

So the goal is to prevent project management commits to cripple in the real project commits. For that, we simply use another branch that should be prevented to be merged by hooks.

Principle

The principle is quite easy:

1. create a gpm branch

2. put all necessary stuff in here:

   • issues list
   • ability to make comment/review/organize based on org-mode files
   • code review via org-annotate-file
   • hooks to share with all contributors
   • webserver to provide a webpage for your project
   • webserver to serve you git project to the world with potential open Pull requests.

Great advantage of org-mode is that its simple flat text files. Anybody can edit it. Even the use of org-annotate-file is just something anyone can do manually quite easily, create a file with all your comments with links to the file (can also precise the line). Of course using emacs or vim-orgmode plugin might really help.

Why org-mode and not markdown?

We don't use markdown because we can handle more complex workflow with orgmode. markdown wasn't created to deal with todo list, etc… Org-mode file can handle meta-datas, can be presented with columns, sorted, can provide agenda views, etc…