See YellowGrass/22 why not.

Submitted by Lennart Kats on 10 February 2010 at 09:04

Do you mean links in issue descriptions, or dependencies between issues. Because links in issue descriptions are already easy to make. For example: this issue. Which is in code:

[this issue](/issue/YellowGrass/23)

One can even refer to projects and other elements of the issue tracker, for example: this project:

[this project](/project/YellowGrass)

That’s nice, but that doesn’t work for me. Why can’t I say YG-23, YG/23, or even (but preferably not) YellowGrass/23? Not quite as nice, but workable, would be [[YG/23]]. But with a regular expression like s/\b([A-Z]\w+/\d+)\b/[[$1]]/ you should be able to capture and convert plain text links as well.

Dependencies is a different issue I would say.

Indeed, a regular expression could allow for shorter issue references. This is well worth implementing. Not sure about the abbreviated project names though. I believe they are primarily confusing and somewhat outdated. Surely typing YellowGrass does not take that much longer than typing YG. Furthermore, typing YellowGrass does not require a user to remember the abbreviation. Remembering project names should be simple, or are otherwise visible on the page.

Well, ideally, the identifiers would appear in the URL: e.g., https://yellowgrass.org/YellowGrass/YG-23. Note that JIRA takes a different approach and uses urls like myjira.org/browse/YG-23. But those aren’t very descriptive and can’t be broken down by users: strip off the YG-23 and you don’t get a useful page. Same goes for the yellowgrass urls right now. Call me a URL purist, but I like URLs that are minimal and elegant yet use a hierarchy that is useful to users.

That said, I can see how abbreviations would introduce a (minor) usability problem if they are not obious to the user. (I don’t see why you would call them “outdated” though?? “Outdated” would be issue.php?project=12&id=23) YellowGrass/23 may be a compromise given the current URL scheme.

BTW, based on code Danny posted earlier, you should be able to add YellowGrass/23-style links as follows:

output(/\b([A-Za-z]\w+/\d+)\b/.replaceAll(“$1”, thetext) as WikiText)

Thanks. I will add this to the next release.

Actually, I just realized it should probably keep old [Foo/22](...) style references intact using a little negative lookahead insertion \(?!\]):

output(/\b([A-Za-z]\w+/\d+)\b(?!])/.replaceAll(“$1”, thetext) as WikiText)

I have tried the suggested replacement, but it permanently fails to match. Most probably, the parameters in replaceAll fail. I have reported this on the WebDSL project: webdsl/148. Issue marked as blocked, closing for now.

for when the issue is fixed: text-decoration: line-through; links to closed issues

Yes, that would be incredibly useful for “meta” issues like Spoofax/55. But for that you would have to scan wikitext pages for the issues they mention and then search & replace them based on the database information. Would be very nice if you would get line-through and issue titles that way…