[Tracker-discuss] Issue tags

[Daniel (ajax) Diniz]

Georg convinced me on IRC, so he now has tags[1] and I've got a brand
new experimental tracker instance[2] up.

Daniel (ajax) Diniz wrote:
> To make the tags more useful, we could implement the list as a
> Multilink like keywords, with a comma-separated input interface like
> those for nosy. Then, the 'arbitrary' part becomes the problem: do we
> want users to be able to create arbitrary, tracker-wide tags? (no, we
> don't, you might think we do but that'd be mistaken :D).

I've gone with this design and tried to distill my paranoia into
content validation. I've set a code review[3] up, any feedback is
welcome.

Some information from a previous message, with answers to some
questions by Georg and [new bits]:

No emails are being sent currently and the db can be reset at any time :)

Any User can create tags and link or unlink them to/from issues. The
helper to pick tags works, but I didn't test for > 20 tags. You can
search for, sort by, display and group by tags. There's a clickable
list of tags in the issue item view (between messages and history),
leads to search results for the linked tag. [You can add or remove
tags to the filter list in the issue list view, with some JS sugar.]

Any given issue has a max number of tags, any tag a max length and a
set of valid chars, currently:
MAXTAGS = 15
MAXLEN = 20
ALLOWED_CHARS = '[a-z_-]+$'

You can see the tags list at http://bot.bio.br/python-dev-exp/tag ,
but I disallowed all editing (only Admin can set descriptions and
change names). I'd have no problem with making them editable by
Developers.

> Georg asked:
>> Deleting a tag will just remove it from all issues it is
linked to, I guess?

A: No, but we could add a Developer link to remove a given tag from
all issues and use the auditor so that removed tags cannot be
recreated.

There's a helper property that generates some noise ('tags_str: yes ->
yes, looks_ok'), but a fix for that is already queued at the meta
tracker (to silence [nosy|message]_count neatly). [I'll apply this
patch and go back to work on Rietveld integration.]

Both auto-assignment and auto-add-as-nosy[1] are trivial to implement
for tags, but I think both should be restricted to Admins only.

>> Do you mean that only admins can change auto-assignment rules, or that
>> only admins can get auto-assigned? I hope it's the former :)

A: Yes, restrict changing the rules to Admins. And until we get a
better UI to work with auto-nosy, I suggest we only allow Developers
to be added to that list.

Now, if this goes in, I'd really like to keep Components as-is for a
while, until we have some strong evidence that trimming some of them
off would be welcome by most users.

</copy'n'paste> :)

Quoting myself:
> I think this idea is worth floating in python-dev: if most people want
> this I can implement it, but I'd like to keep most components we have
> now.

I don't like the idea of changing Components without pinging
python-dev. Lots of discussion on IRC (I'll try to report on that)
shows this shouldn't happen without a great UI for tags and some other
pre-requisites.

Best regards,
Daniel

[1] http://tinyurl.com/roundup-tags
[2] http://bot.bio.br/python-dev-exp/
[3] http://codereview.appspot.com/40100