What's the algorithm for colour-coding and auto-complete of labels?

[Keith Furnell]

Once you define more than a few labels for your compass components, some sort of grouping of related labels becomes desirable. The only functionality to assist with this currently seems to be color/colour coding:

1. Is there any way to predict, and moreover potentially influence, the colour that Compass allocates to a label?
2. In the absence of the above, we've taken to using prefix characters for related labels 
   (e.g. ".licensed") though this seems to mess with the auto-complete - e.g. typing ".li" will suggest "linkable" but not ".licensed". Is this a bug?

Reference: https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Compass-articles/New-feature-labels/ba-p/1781704

[Kali Cornn]

1. We have a fixed set of colors we pick from and utilize a hash function to set the colors. So technically it's predictable since the hash function is deterministic.

2. This might be something on search platform's end, they might consider characters like `.` differently than regular letters.

[Keith Furnell]

Thanks for the implementation explanation. Translating these to UX, this means that:

1. The colour of labels effectively can't be predicted/influenced by the user - so, unless they get lucky, the colour is meaningless
2. Users need to allow for some "black magic" when it comes to auto-complete

Combined, these limit the usefulness of the component labelling feature.