sow-tools/docs/agents/issue-tracker.md

Issue tracker: Gitea (via tea)

Issues for this repo live in Gitea at git.westgate.pw, repo ShadowsOverWestgate/sow-tools. Use the tea CLI for all operations — gh does not work here. For anything tea lacks a subcommand for, use tea api <endpoint> (Gitea's API mirrors GitHub's closely).

Authenticate with your own tea login (tea login add); never commit tokens or tea config into this repo. Note Gitea blocks self-review, so approving a PR needs a different account than the one that opened it.

Where work lives

Markdown in this repo is reference, law, or an ADR — nothing else (sow-codebase ADR-0001). Four homes, no overlap:

• Live work → wayfinder maps + Gitea issues. Closeable, assignable, queryable. Never a markdown file.
• Settled decisions → ADR files in docs/adr/. Immutable, findable, never closed, never edited — only superseded by a later ADR pointing back. When an issue ends in a durable decision, write the ADR, then close the issue pointing at it. Decisions spanning repos go to sow-platform/docs/adr/.
• Standing law → DOCTRINE.md, AGENTS.md, CONTEXT.md. Rules that are always true and vocabulary everyone shares — not the record of one decision.
• Current-state reference → docs describing what the code does now, kept honest by review touching them.

Anything else — implementation plans, design specs, concepts, handoffs, progress trackers, scratch — is process. It does not live in this repo. It lives in a Gitea issue or a wayfinder map, where it can be assigned, closed, and superseded. Small tasks need no written plan at all.

Deleting a process doc is not destroying history — git log -- <path> recovers it. But unfinished intent (a design never built, an open question still wanted) is live, not history: harvest it to a Gitea issue before deleting.

sow-docs is deprecated and read-only. Never add to it, never send work there.

Which repo gets the issue

Issues follow ownership. File the issue in the repo that owns the work — see the Repo/Owns/Produces table in the workspace root AGENTS.md. Standing in one repo is not a reason to file there.

If work spans repos, file it in the repo that owns the outcome and reference the others from it. A wrong-repo issue is a routing bug, not a filing preference — move it.

Conventions

• Create an issue: tea issues create --title "..." --description "..."
• Read an issue: tea issues <number> and tea api repos/ShadowsOverWestgate/sow-tools/issues/<number>/comments for comments.
• List issues: tea issues list --state open (add --labels ... to filter).
• Comment: tea comment <number> "..." </dev/null Always redirect stdin. tea reads stdin to EOF and appends it to the body, so any non-interactive shell (every agent) hangs forever without </dev/null. Same trap on tea issues create --description and tea pr create.
• Apply / remove labels: tea issues edit <number> --add-labels "Kind/Bug" (and --remove-labels). This handles org-level labels (Kind/*, Priority/*, Reviewed/*, Status/*) from tea 0.15 onwards. On 0.14 it did not: name resolution searched only this repo's own label set, so an org label matched nothing and the command exited 0, printed the issue, and changed nothing. Upstream fixed it in v0.15 (modules/task/labels.go also queries ListOrgLabels). Note tea labels lists repo labels only and will not show you the org set — tea api orgs/ShadowsOverWestgate/labels does.
• tea api needs a token in the login; SSH auth is not enough. It sends only the login's token: field and does not sign requests with your SSH key, so an SSH-key-only login gets {"message":"token is required"} on every call that needs auth. Reads against these public repos still succeed anonymously, which hides the gap until the first write. Add a token to the login in ~/.config/tea/config.yml (Settings > Applications; write:issue covers labels, comments and dependencies) and tea api works for reads and writes alike. The tea issues / tea pr subcommands authenticate either way, so they keep working with no token at all — that asymmetry is what makes this confusing to diagnose.
• Verify every label change by re-reading it. A label command exiting 0 is not evidence it applied — that is exactly how the 0.14 silent no-op above hid for so long, and assuming otherwise has already cost one investigation several wrong turns. Read the resulting set back with tea api repos/ShadowsOverWestgate/sow-tools/issues/<number> and check its labels field, or tea issues ls -o json. The read-back reflects the write immediately; if it comes back empty, the write genuinely failed. Do not explain an empty read-back away as replication lag.
• Close: tea issues close <number>

tea infers the repo from the git remote when run inside the clone. Gitea shares one number space across issues and PRs.

Pull requests as a triage surface

PRs as a request surface: no.

When a skill says "publish to the issue tracker"

Create a Gitea issue with tea issues create.

When a skill says "fetch the relevant ticket"

Run tea issues <number> plus the comments API call above.

Wayfinding operations

Used by /wayfinder. The map is a single issue with child issues as tickets.

• Map: a single issue labelled wayfinder:map, holding the Notes / Decisions-so-far / Fog body. tea issues create --title "..." --description "..." --labels wayfinder:map.
• Child ticket: this Gitea instance (v1.27) has no native sub-issue hierarchy, so a child issue carries Part of #<map> at the top of its description, and is also added to a task list in the map body. Labels: wayfinder:<type> (research/prototype/grilling/task). Once claimed, the ticket is assigned to the driving dev.
• Blocking: Gitea's native dependencies API — the canonical, UI-visible representation (shows as "Depends on" / "Blocks" on the issue page). Add an edge with tea api -X POST repos/ShadowsOverWestgate/sow-tools/issues/<child>/dependencies -f owner=ShadowsOverWestgate -f repo=sow-tools -F index=<blocker>, where <blocker> is the blocker's issue index (its #number — Gitea's dependency API takes the index directly, unlike GitHub's numeric database id). Check status with tea api repos/ShadowsOverWestgate/sow-tools/issues/<child>/dependencies (GET) — a ticket is unblocked when every returned issue's state is closed.
• Frontier query: list the map's open children (tea issues list --state open, keep the ones whose description contains Part of #<map>), drop any with an open dependency (per the GET above) or an assignee; first in map order wins.
• Claim: tea issues edit <n> --add-assignees <username> — the session's first write.
• Resolve: tea comment <n> "<answer>" </dev/null, then tea issues close <n>, then append a context pointer (gist + link) to the map's Decisions-so-far.