Re: Descriptions citing comments (was: Ticket view)

[John Chambers <ch...@apache.org>]

My initial question would be who decides what is important, because surely
that could be different depending on the reader. For instance another
engineer could comment on a ticket purely from the code base perspective
which would be important for other engineers but less so for users/testers
etc. Also you could still end up with a huge description if many comments
get quoted.

Maybe another solution is to allow tags to be applied to comments. These
tags can then be used to filter the comments to make them more manageable.
We could then automatically tag certain comments i.e comments added via
version control or external services. We could display a simple tag cloud
above the comments to make them easy to filter.

Another smaller issue I have with citation/quotation is that it could be
taken out of context.
On 29 February 2012 12:45, Gary <ga...@wandisco.com> wrote:

> I'd like to hear some opinions on this so I've split it out into a
> separate thread:
>
> On 02/28/2012 04:37 PM, Joachim Dreimann wrote:
>
>> 4. There needs to be a mechanism to highlight important comments
>>
>> I talked with Gary for a long time about how we could allow users to
>> highlight comments, because once a ticket has 10-20 comments it can
>> become impractical to read them all. Star voting systems, +1s etc all
>> have their own problems, and encouraging the description to be updated
>> regularly with a summary is extra work and rarely done.
>>
>> The system we came up with would allow users to cite comments on a
>> paragraph basis. These citations would then automatically be added to
>> the bottom of the Description as text+markup, so can be edited and
>> moved simply by editing the description. The mockup both shows a mouse
>> hovering over a paragraph, which then shows the 'cite' option to the
>> left of the paragraph, and an indicator of what will be included. In
>> the description there is an already cited paragraph at the bottom.
>>
>
> Obviously I like the idea as we discussed it but I am also wondering about
> potential problems associated with it.
>
> I believe that we were thinking of a fairly simple solution of automated
> copying of a comment (or part of a comment) into the description with a
> link back to the comment itself. That would mean that we don't need to
> store any extra information regarding this operation - a comment would
> therefore have no knowledge of its cited status.
>
> I am a little uneasy that this represents duplicated information but I
> suppose it might be justified by allowing the editor to be as specific as
> required by trimming the quote or deciding to rephrase.
>
> The other annoyance for me is that we would see the act of adding the
> citation in the comments as a description edit.
>
> Would it be worth storing the citation information outside of the
> description? That would make it a little more like the existing +1 or star
> ratings but with the quotations listed beneath the ticket in some form?
> That could solve the problem of the unneeded extra comment creation and
> should allow us to indicate against a comment that it is cited if that is
> seen as helpful.
>
> Cheers,
>    Gary
>
>