[bru]

You use vim outliner plugin for the issues? How does that work?

Are your issues simple text files describing it? In a "issues" folder? Do you enforce a format? How do you track their status?

[allegory]

Yes. Indent per issue. One .otl file with all issues in it. No format enforced although I'm pretty consistent at writing issues. Once complete the issue is simply deleted. I've done this up to 4 people and it has worked wonderfully even though they had to learn vim :)

You can pipe it through awk to remove any lines starting with a space/tab, sort it then then diff the result with earlier versions to work out progress etc as well.

[hrjet]

Not the parent, but I do something similar for projects where I am the only contributor. It is far easier to track them with a simple text editor.

For multiple contributors, I don't think this will scale well, atleast without using some tool on top of the VCS.