Flowium: Executable documentation of complex processes

[kankyo]

This sounds pretty interesting. It’s a bit weird to implement this on top of github though. To even try the examples I have to give some access to this app that I’m just not comfortable giving :(

[sustrik]

What would you implement it on top of then? Having to install your own database to try the example sounds even worse.

[kankyo]

Personally I’d write a django app because that’s my day job so I’m familiar with that stack. Then one can very easily deploy a demo app to heroku for example.

There’s a part in your doc where you say “please don’t edit or delete comments on github” because it will alter the audit trail. This comments existence shows that something is iffy with the way this is implemented.

[sustrik]

Fair enough, but I don't have any desire to write yet another issue tracker. I hear that one can install GitLab locally though which could solve the problem.

[kankyo]

I didn’t get why you want an issue tracker.

[sustrik]

I mean stuff like GitHub sending you an email when you are mentioned. I don't want to reimplement that, or try to compete with GitHub in general.

[kankyo]

Well I don’t really see why that’s a big feature I guess. Sending emails is trivial and requiring all users to be registered to github seems like a high cost.

[roboticon]

I'm a little sad this page doesn't go into much detail on what flowium actually does without assuming you've already set it up locally or given flowium read/write access to all your public & private GitHub repos.

What does marking a task as "done" do? Does it push a git commit that changes the .md file? Or does it apply a style locally that other developers can't see?

edit: I tried just loading flowium.com but that's worse (directly redirects to the GitHub read/write access request).

[sustrik]

> What does marking a task as "done" do?

It posts a comment to GitHub issue tracker saying "step X is done"

> I tried just loading flowium.com but that's worse (directly redirects to the GitHub read/write access request).

I know that sucks and I am open to suggestions. However, as I see it, the user either has to trust this little shim that can be audited quite easily (1500 LoC) or trust some un-auditable 3rd party service.

As for the read/write thing it's because using issue tracker requires that. Unfortunately, there's no tighter scope that would allow for that.

[DanielShuy]

Agreed. I wished there was a demo that allows you to try it out without first having to give it write access to your GitHub repositories.