Improve Issue relations and interactions within an MR description
Problem to solve
From my personal POV, it feels a bit odd that the GitLab web interface modifies/adds text to my MR descriptions altogether. If there were a flag to turn it off, I would (since we already add the ticket number to our commit messages already, by convention, so the relation is already there between the MR and the ticket). Also, another (perhaps bigger) problem with the current implementation: it makes it impossible for me to deliberately write "Closes #12345 (closed)" in an MR when I really want an issue to be closed automatically when the MR is merged. So yes, spinning out a new issue would make sense. We can discuss more in detail there what steps would be remaining to get this to be a really "top-notch" feature that we can all love and enjoy. ref
JTBD
When relating MRs to an Issue via the MR description, I want more flexibility and control over the usage of Closes...
and Relates...
, so that I can correctly manipulate the Issue from the MR as needed.
Intended users
- Rachel (Release Manager)
- Delaney (Development Team Lead)
- Sasha (Software Developer)
- Devon (DevOps Engineer)
- Sidney (Systems Administrator)
- Simone (Software Engineer in Test)
- Allison (Application Ops)
Further details
Proposal
Provide a way to disable automatically adding Closes...
and Relates...
to MR descriptions while still providing the ability to manually specify these relationships when desired.
Permissions and Security
- Consistent with existing use cases.
Documentation
- Yes, we will want to improve the documentation to better reflect this relationship.
Availability & Testing
As this would impact the behavior that MRs can take upon issues, we would want to make sure the following are in place:
- Unit test changes
- Integration test changes
- End-to-end test change
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
- This will be determined based upon the final proposal.
What is the type of buyer?
- An IC so this would naturally fall into GitLab Core
Is this a cross-stage feature?
- Yes. This sits at the intersection of devopscreate / groupsource code and devopsplan / groupproject management
Links / references
- Original issue that partially implemented this proposal: #19754 (closed)
/cc @jramsay