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  closed, never edited — only superseded by a later ADR pointing back.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and superseded.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.