Thanks for raising this issue, David.

Tags are restricted because internally they are projects. Project (and thus tag) namespace is global, so if everyone were to create 3 tags, then if we laid them all end-to-end, they would stretch halfway to the moon[1].

My understanding about the history of tracking tasks is that they were parent tasks, like epics, but with no concept of being "done". Something like "Improve documentation" could have children come and go, but would persist potentially forever. A project (or tag) would be better.

I don't understand "Creating new tracking tasks (tasks that 'automatically' get resolved when all its dependency tasks are resolved) in Phabricator is discouraged", because that almost describes epics or other parent tasks. Those are a good thing, and should not be discouraged. Except for the "automatically get resolved" part, but if epics did automatically resolve, I don't think that would be a bad thing.

Using columns within a categorization project would be an option. And a less-cumbersome option now than it would have been earlier this year, because phabricator now allows you to change a task's column within a workboard by setting a dropdown. (You always used to have to drag-and-drop them).

You could just insert a known string, like [Bad weighting] in the titles of tasks related to that type of issue. Searching would work, as long as you chose strings without accidental collisions. And as long as you were very careful to never misspell one of your keywords.

Please continue the discussion!

[1] Ok, not really. But autocomplete for projects would become a lot more difficult.

Kevin Smith
Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation

On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 8:24 AM, Erik Bernhardson <ebernhardson@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Another option may be a 'Search-Quality' project or some such with associatedd board.  We could create columns for each category and drop them where they belong. The problem here though might be that some things sanely fit into two categories, but a workboard can only have them in one place.

On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 8:11 AM, Trey Jones <tjones@wikimedia.org> wrote:

For broader classifications, there's nothing wrong about tracking tasks.

I agree in theory, but I'm trying not to advocate against standard practice in the developer community. The first link I sent states "In Phabricator, it would be better to create a Project (tag) to categorize this type of work", and the entire sentence (!) is linked to the other page, which states:

Creating new tracking tasks (tasks that "automatically" get resolved when all its dependency tasks are resolved) in Phabricator is discouraged. It is recommended to create a project instead.

So it seems that someone somewhere doesn't like tracking tasks. Neither discussion page shed any light.

The whiteboard sounds very nice. I found this ticket from about 2 years ago, and the idea of "personal tags" or something else similar to the Bugzilla whiteboard for Phabricator was discussed very, very briefly and the ticket declined and closed.

Trey Jones

Software Engineer, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation

On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 10:51 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:

In bugzilla's last years we've had a field "whiteboard", used for personal notes. You could just edit the task description to add your own keywords at the bottom. For broader classifications, there's nothing wrong about tracking tasks.

Nemo

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