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Comment by jbergstroem | Hacker News Reader

There are github actions to help out here. I use the todo "bot" that marks up todo comments you would create in PR's or otherwise into issues. You can for instance assign yourself/someone and change how you want it labelled.

https://github.com/marketplace/todo is one of them.

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That's neat. I never knew this existed. Unfortunately I mainly use Gitlab wherever I work.

I don’t know much about git hooks, but I think that it would be fairly simple to wrote a small one that parses the changes for the todo comment and then calls to Gitlab’s API. Double points for closing the ticket if the todo comment is removed.

You could probably do it with a Gitlab CI step + python (or whatever language of choice) script as well.

Doing it client side might make it hard to do things like accepting MRs from forks.

There's an issue for this in GitLab's tracker:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/14259

Sadly, it's four years old and seems pretty stagnant.

It's unfortunate gitlab is built as a monolith. I'd be very capable of writing the code for implementing such a feature myself if gitlab had a first class API. The code, as we all know, would look something like this:

  for commit
    diff = commit.diff
    for line in diff.result
      if 'todo' in line
        line_id = hash(line)


        if existing := issues.find(tags={'todo_id': line_id}):
          existing.update(code_url = new line location)
        else: 
          issues.create(....)

But because these APIs aren't first class a change like this requires deep knowledge of gitlab's internals and acceptance and prioritization of features from gitlab's core team.

Hey there, I'm a GitLab community advocate, just wanted to thank you for brining attention to this issue, our team commented to get the conversation moving today:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/14259#note_327...

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