Managing issues (the issues category)
The issues category of commands allows you to manage the issue trackers of
the student repositories. The currently available core actions are open,
close and list, which achieve about what you’d expect.
Opening Issues (the open action)
The issues open command is very simple. Before we use it, however, we need
to write a Markdown-formatted issue. Just like with the update command (see
Updating student repositories (the update action)), the first line of the file is the title. Here is
issue.md:
An important announcement
### Dear students
I have this important announcement to make.
Regards,
_The Announcer_
Awesome, that’s an excellent issue. Let’s open it in the task-2 repo
for our dear students slarse, glennol and glassey, who are listed in the
students.txt file (see Set up student repositories (the setup action)).
$ repobee issues open --assignments task-2 --students-file students.txt -i issue.md
Opened issue slarse-task-2/#1-'An important announcement'
Opened issue glennol-task-2/#1-'An important announcement'
Opened issue glassey-task-2/#1-'An important announcement'
From the output, we can read that in each of the repos, an issue with the title
An important announcement was opened as issue nr 1 (#1). The number
isn’t that important, it’s mostly good to note that the title was fetched
correctly. And that’s it! Neat, right?
Closing Issues (the close action)
Now that the deadline has passed for task-2, we want to close the
issues opened in open. The close-issues command takes a regex that runs
against titles. All issues with matching titles are closed. While you can
make this really difficult, closing all issues with the title An important
announcement is simple: we provide the regex \AAn important announcement\Z.
$ repobee issues close -a task-2 --sf students.txt -r '\AAn important announcement\Z'
[INFO] Closed issue slarse-task-2/#1-'An important announcement'
[INFO] Closed issue glennol-task-2/#1-'An important announcement'
[INFO] Closed issue glassey-task-2/#1-'An important announcement'
And there we go, easy as pie!
Note
Enclosing a regex expression in \A and \Z means that it must match
from the start of the string to the end of the string. So, the regex used here
will match the title An important announcement, but it will not
match e.g. An important announcement and lunch or Hey An important
announcement. In other words, it matches exactly the title An important
announcement, and nothing else. Not even an extra space or linebreak is
allowed.
Listing Issues (the list action)
It can often be interesting to check what issues exist in a set of repos,
especially so if you’re a teaching assistant who just doesn’t want to leave your
trusty terminal. This is where the issues list command comes into play.
Typically, we are only interested in open issues, and can then use list
issues like so:
$ repobee issues list -a task-2 --sf students.txt
[INFO] slarse-task-2/#1: Grading Criteria created 2018-09-12 18:20:56 by glassey
[INFO] glennol-task-2/#1: Grading Criteria created 2018-09-12 18:20:56 by glassey
[INFO] glassey-task-2/#1: Grading Criteria created 2018-09-12 18:20:56 by glassey
So, just grading criteria issues posted by the user glassey. What happened to
the important announcements? Well, they are closed. If we want to se closed
issues, we must specifically say so with the --closed argument.
$ repobee issues list -a task-2 --sf students.txt --closed
[INFO] slarse-task-2/#2: An important announcement created 2018-09-17 17:46:43 by slarse
[INFO] glennol-task-2/#2: An important announcement created 2018-09-17 17:46:43 by slarse
[INFO] glassey-task-2/#2: An important announcement created 2018-09-17 17:46:43 by slarse
Other interesting arguments include --all for both open and closed issues,
--show-body for showing the body of each issue, and --author <username>
for filtering by author. There’s not much more to it, see repobee issues list
-h for complete and up-to-date information on usage!