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by planede 1491 days ago
I don't get why so many people likes this. No, I don't want a suddenly failing pipeline on master because of an expiring TODO.

A better approach is for a TODO to be required to reference a ticket, and add a ticket. Prioritization should happen in your issue tracking, not in the code.
2 comments
jandrewrogers 1491 days ago
Many TODOs (the majority in code bases I've worked on that had them) do not require any action, they are annotations to the code base about future potential development or research. Addressing the TODO, either by removal or implementation, could be deferred indefinitely with no consequences and often are. These aren't things that need to be fixed per se. For example, I've seen TODOs widely used to document optimization or generalization opportunities in the code base.

You do not want to pollute your ticketing system with myriad TODOs. They are not meaningfully actionable and they tend to require very local code context so it is easier to understand them as code annotations.

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Griffinsauce 1491 days ago
Those can just be added without "TODO" then? You're explicitly saying that you're marking things you are not likely to do as to-do, that seems like a bad idea whatever your preference wrt automation is.
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everybodyknows 1491 days ago
The point is to concisely distinguish proposed action by maintainers, at whatever level of urgency, from purely descriptive comments intended for the benefit of users.
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ParetoOptimal 1491 days ago
Because the annoyance means it will get fixed? In issue tracking it just gets archived.
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arinlen 1491 days ago
> Because the annoyance means it will get fixed? In issue tracking it just gets archived.

That makes no sense at all.

If a ticket is archived them that means the issue was evaluated and considered irrelevant and a distraction that should be ignored. Otherwise in the very least it should be placed on a backlog, and reconsidered each and every single time someone picks/is assigned a new task.

Nagging through out-of-band means to push an irrelevant task that was already considered and discarded makes all matters worse, and frankly sounds like a playground for petty passive-aggressive office politics.

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planede 1491 days ago
If you want to set it a date, then set a deadline for the issue. It should still annoy the right person.
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