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Comment by michaelmure | Hacker News Reader

Hi, author here, nice to see some interest :-)

FYI, this is my near-term roadmap:

  - have the webui accept external auth (like github oauth) so that it can be a public portal and accept external interactions
  - have the webui expose a git remote endpoint
  - slightly rework identities (and likely root them in did:plc for pubkey distribution, the identity system from bluesky, without being an ATProto thing), which would allow to share identities between repos way more naturally
  - extend to support pull-requests, possibly CI. That would make it a somewhat complete local-first forge that you can also self-host trivially

Also, while there is some attention ... I'm considering working on this full time. If you have some advice or opportunities on how I can support myself doing this, let me know!

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> I'm considering working on this full time. If you have some advice or opportunities on how I can support myself doing this, let me know!

Make it easy for non-technical users to also use this software. That will probably get you further along with gaining paid customers, IMO, because that's the hard part with something like this. It's easy for anyone who isn't used to `git` to use GitHub issues or something like Jira or Shortcut, but something tied to `git` or another cli tool is a hard sell for non-programmers, I think.

Make a program users can install on their MacOS/Windows desktop that interacts with a repository, without any need for the user to use `git`, or make a secure/hardened docker image that an org can run in their infra that links to repos and allows interaction via the web.

First of all: Huge respect for getting something out the door, looks really useful.

> I'm considering working on this full time. If you have some advice or opportunities on how I can support myself doing this, let me know!

You could consider an "enterprise" tier with a special subset of features and guaranteed support. But my experience tells me this will be really hard to substantially monetize, as the customer profile for that solution is probably not spending on software until they really need to (the saying goes: selling to developers is impossible, you need to sell to their boss). Maybe a donation model or a creator-centric thing could work out!

Yeah I agree that monetization seems hard here. But one niche that might work - tons of people are using LLMs to build out side projects and keeping tickets in the same repo as the project could be really frictionless for LLMs to reach for without an MCP server.

Don't sell to developers for their day jobs, but sell to developers for their hobbies.

To be fair I was also unhappy with current tooling and made my own [0] in a day or so.

I think this tool would be a hard thing to monetise unfortunately in 2026. It’s just… so easy to make stuff now.

[0] https://github.com/tristanmatthias/tasks

> - have the webui accept external auth (like github oauth) so that it can be a public portal and accept external interactions

Have you looked into ForgeFed? It's a WIP plan for different Forgejo based forges to federate with each other. https://forgefed.org/

There's also this: https://indieauth.net/ though I haven't looked into it. I hope you could integrate one of these into your planned OAuth/account system!

Thank you for working on this, I love the idea. What surprised me was the way user identities is managed, I assumed you’d use whatever git uses. Would you mind elaborating on that?

same question here. the other limitation i ran into immediately was only having two status types: open and closed

It's really hard (impossible?) to define a feature set that work for everyone. Every bug tracker is a bit different, and if you want to have everything you end with Jira, which I'm not sure is actually solving a problem.

However, git-bug's data model is designed in a way that you can add more "operations" on an entity (say: assign a bug) without every client having to implement it. You can also add your own entity type (pr, kanban, ...) the same way. Clients will just ignore that extra data and support what they want. This open the possibility for addons and so on.

For this specific case of the bug states, I want to add a config entity to configure that. You'd start with a reasonable default (open/close) but you could tune it for the needs of your project.

that sounds great and looking toward to it. is there an issue i can subscribe to?

There is https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/issues/63, but I have plenty to do before that.

Sure.

Identities in git can barely be called that. You define your name and email, maybe sign your commit. Those signature can be checked but it's really optional and often left to another system (e.g. github or your git viewer). Access right in the git remote is also a completely different thing.

In a distributed/p2p system with social interaction you need well defined identities that carries public keys. If you want to work offline, you actually need a full self-certified history of public key updates. Any changes in the entities (bug, pr, ...) need to have an author and a clear logical time so that you can backtrack to which pubkey(s) was active at the moment. Note that if you accept external contribution from a webui, you still need those identities being created in the background, possibly later to be "adopted" when using the native tooling.

Identities in git-bug is a part that nearly didn't change since the inception, and it's time for an upgrade. At the moment they are a linear series of changes (that is, NOT a CRDT) and are stuck within one repo. You can push/pull around but you are really just making a copy that you need to maintain.

My plan is to split this concept in two parts: pubkey log, and how they anchor within the repo's logical time. It turns out that if you split that way, the first part is pretty much exactly what did:plc is. Additionally, for complicated reasons like allowing recovery without opening major weakness, that's the one thing where having a centralized reference is important, so relying on the public https://plc.directory/ makes sense.

> In a distributed/p2p system with social interaction you need well defined identities that carries public keys. If you want to work offline, you actually need a full self-certified history of public key updates.

I don't understand how this is a problem. Isn't this already solved with keyservers and importing to a local keyring? My Linux distro has no problem keeping track of who is who and if they are trusted (not updating for a year or two would probably break things).

> so that you can backtrack to which pubkey(s) was active at the moment

I think GitHub solves this by simply checking at the time of the push and then never again (which is why you can change the keys without de-verifying older commits. Doesn't git's design yield blockchain-like assurance that nothing in the past has been modified?

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https://web.plc.directory/ looks interesting, never heard of it.

Personally, I think signed commits should be the default. This is especially true in the age of AI where distinguishing humans from machines becomes harder every day. I would love for encrypted email/IM and sharing keys to be the norm for everyone but we're not there and may never be.

> I don't understand how this is a problem. Isn't this already solved with keyservers and importing to a local keyring? My Linux distro has no problem keeping track of who is who and if they are trusted (not updating for a year or two would probably break things).

There is different pieces that solve part of the problem (name/email from the git config, key servers for *some* users), but everything is disconnected, unstable, incomplete. Git-bug needs a stable identifier, the full self-certified pubkey log ... Those solutions are not good enough.

> Doesn't git's design yield blockchain-like assurance that nothing in the past has been modified?

It's not specific to git, but yes you get a chain of data blocks, content-addressed with signature support. That's what you want to build on, to have identities, roles, rules to enforce in a p2p system.

> Personally, I think signed commits should be the default. This is especially true in the age of AI where distinguishing humans from machines becomes harder every day. I would love for encrypted email/IM and sharing keys to be the norm for everyone but we're not there and may never be.

Agree! Note that if git-bug bring a solid identity primitive and publish pubkeys ... it can also carry the pubkeys that are *already* used to sign commits, publish them in the same public registry and verify code commits transparently, without relying on a third party to do so. Imho that's something missing in the current git model: if there is identities, there are segregated in third party systems like github. DIDs brings a lot to the table.

Ah, I see what you're getting at. Reminds me of Keybase. It's mostly just a messaging app now but there was some similar efforts made 10+ years ago:

https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-new-key-model

https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone

interesting stuff

Git-bug looks amazing! Author of GitSocial here, would love to hear your opinion:

https://gitsocial.org/

Were you aware of git-bug when you created gitsocial? If so, which patterns did you reuse and which ones did you decide to diverge from? Or would you say the two projects embody fundamentally different visions?

Any thoughts to making this integrate alongside other systems that use git metadata to track changes?

I'm thinking mostly of Gerrit, which keeps the entire code review and change history in git as well.

Being able to keep literally everything in the same git repo seems highly appealing.

Stoked to see this.

I've long felt that something like this was the way but have never gotten around to working on it.

For your roadmap, it would help with collaborating and organizing to use the issue queue

Something like "scoped labels" https://youtu.be/7l7tnEva6I8?is=InYAVXHomobvbOjL

:thumbsup

Thanks for posting! I don't see any mention of beads, which can also store the database in Git (via Dolt). How does this compare to it?

this existed long before beads

Call for people who severely dislike Jira to chip in $1 each, that should give you some runway.

Is bug reporting in the future, or past? Is Git the future, or past?

It's deeply interesting to me that you decided to override git conflict-resolution (at least in the 90% of cases) in favor of CRDT conflict-resolution. That sort of decision is not uncommon but I was just kinda wondering -- did the CRDT idea come first or did you try a plain-text format for storing the bugs and you ran into certain common workflows where that wasn't ergonomic? (My first guess would maybe just be appending comments to the ticket -- so like if a ticket is a TOML file, you both append a comment at the end, Git immediately screams about what order should those two comments be in -- instead to make that ergonomic within Git's limitations you have to like, represent the comments as a directory tree with no inherent order and UUIDv4 names, and then Git will say "oh you both put blobs in that tree? that's fine. no conflicts," and then you have to order them by (declared-time, UUID) on the client side.)

What's not quite so clear from what I'm skimming is what you did to alleviate Git's postmodernism. What I mean is, Git just holds a bunch of refs like tags and branches and they all deliberately, inherently have equal valence -- this comes from the history of Linux being developed on an email list, there literally is not "one Linux", there is no truth about "what is the Linux v6.18 kernel" but rather there is a big family of v6.18 Linux kernels and anyone who wants to spin up a new one can literally just grab an existing v6.18 kernel and write a patch and bam, you have a new one. It's the blind sages and the elephant, every sage is correct about what the software is, within their limited ability to perceive what the software does. And this like perennially causes problems, right, people use Git for a modernist thing like CI/CD where at most companies "what's running in prod?" is one of those questions that we don't like to say "well it depends on your perspective, there is no one truth..."

Sorry for the long explainer -- I'm just aware that this is a very idiosyncratic way of phrasing the D in DVCS. But it's like, in concrete terms, do you have clients force themselves to declare a certain repo as their origin, and a certain ref on origin is the blessed Git-Bug ref that they have to push from and pull to? And like the add-on that you've crafted just doesn't let you branch the ticket list and all of that? Or -- the opposite -- do you go all-in on the postmodernism and say "no whether some strange-looking functionality is a 'bug', that is a fact that needs to be added to the holistic perspective of the project, and whether that bug is deemed fixed is a similar fact that, like, if you say you fixed the bug in `dev` it might still be not fixed in `uat` or `prod` -- so the bugs need to be stored in the repo that you're versioning anyways. And we use these CRDTs to give you a bird's eye consistent view of a Bunch of repos and all of their current statuses and all that." Or do you take a third direction that's neither purely modernist "this is the truth" nor purely postmodernist "every branch is true".

The choice to not use git merge handling was there from the beginning, the proper CRDT came a bit later when I understood more the problem and it's possible solutions. From a UX perspective, manually fixing merge conflict is the right thing for code, but it's a different story for social interactions: when the output you operate on is code, you want to precisely control that output. When the output is people understanding each other, you want to capture the intent. It's ok to, in rare case, be a little bit off in edge cases of the conflict resolution. What's not ok is forcing on the user to understand and deal with the problem.

Note that this very question is why some previous attempt at distributed bug tracker failed.

As for the postmodernism of git, I don't know ;-). I'm simply building on top of the lower level git database and leveraging the tools I have (like push/pull). Each bug is essentially its own namespace of operations that get moved around between repos. As with any CRDT, the state of that document get built from what is known at the time.

Your response here regarding CRDT was enlightening and thought provoking to me. Thank you. Really appreciate the distinction of "intent" especially in the context of human social interactions vs. code precision. Very interesting and insightful.

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