I thought I’d have a play…
So with Sentinel I have started to think about what I am going to do about documentation and ticketing. It’s quite important to have some documentation to explain what is going on and it’s very important to have a way of tracking issues and features for the application.
Already it is probably clear I care a little bit more for the ticketing element than the documentation, I had a play with the GitHub issue tracking application and it’s not as bad as I thought it would be.
GitHub issues
I decided to log a few issues within the sentinel project and see what I could do. I was not holding up much hope as there really is not much of an interface there to do much with. I persevered anyway and I was amazed at what I could do with it.
It has a couple of things that enable it to be quite powerful with its minimal interface, Labels and Milestones.
Labels… Unlike most ticketing systems GitHub doesn’t ensure the user selects an issue type or set one as default so every ticket is uncategorised, this is about the extent of the downsides. You can create your own labels and you can apply multiple labels to the same ticket, so for example you could have a ticket labeled with “bug” and “won’t fix” this structure gives you enough to be able to categorise tickets for planning / searching purposes.
Milestones… These are very useful, you set a name for the milestone and can associate tickets with a milestone, each milestone has a date associated with it for completion, which is about all you need really. This gives you the ability to work in an agile way with it, you can create small sprints (Milestones) with the tickets associated with them and plan your work based around that.
So in summary, the issues tracking in GitHub is okay, if you have low volume and do not wish to track any more details such as effort etc then it’s fine, and for me, if I didn’t know better or if I hadn’t installed other applications before I would probably use it, but for my project I will probably go with something else.
GitHub Wiki
This was rather more disappointing, to be clear I only left it in the markdown mode, but still disappointing.
You can basically do the Headings, text formatting, code blocks, lists, images, links, quotes and horizontal rules.
This is disappointing as it is only the very basic commands, HTML would have been better, here’s the lrough list fo what they’re doing, out of a much larger set, h1,h2,h3 a,img,pre,li,ol,ul but needless to say, if you are not tech savvy enough to set up media wiki (Which is a rubbish wiki IMO) but are smart enough to set up git hub then there’s other issues. Granted, you would need somewhere to host the wiki… if only you get get wiki hosting free online and find it easily by searching for it, hang on… Try This
In short, there’s better tools out there for the job also free, don’t be lazy and look them up, failing that do it in plain text and use ascii art to format the pages
summary
The apps they provide around the wiki and issues are good enough to get started with but they’re not really suitable long term I’d think with very little searching online you would find free hosting of better services, with that in mind I’m probably going to set my own up at some point.
soimasysadmin 