Inline comments on issue/MR descriptions

Description

When collaborating on issues, particularly epics or meta issues, a linear comment stream isn't sufficient. In many cases, we find ourselves resorting to Google Docs (or Paper or Canvas or whatever) to write up longer topics and collaborate on them. Perhaps we could embrace wikis for these longer topics, but for a variety of reasons, issues are our chosen format, despite their inefficiencies. Let's make collaborating with issues even better than using Google Docs.

Proposal

  • After we have realtime, collaborative editing of issue descriptions
  • Add the ability to comment on individual lines in an issue description.
  • Follow the flow of comments on lines of code in a merge request. e.g.
    • comments should appear in the activity stream,
    • and show part of the description above the comment for context,
    • with link to the original description,
    • and notifications will be sent as usual.
  • In the description itself, indicate that there are inline comments,
  • but unlike MR comments, these inline comments should be less distracting. Google Docs and Paper provide good examples here where the comments appear to the right of the main content.

Links / references