This is one area where I feel github is really letting us down.
Everything ends up in a giant "bag", where you end up with 1000+ "issues". While you can go into issues then sort by a given label, this has to be done actively, and constantly kept up to date.
I'd prefer something more like an 'inbox', where issues can be filed into different categories which moves the out of the 'new' section. This is what most large projects are doing anyway with labels.
A large part of this comes down to the venue. The early part of GitHub really exemplified the "move fast and break things" mentality. GitHub broke the software world's ability to grapple with bugs, both in affordances i.e. the tools that it exposes for managing them, and, it would seem, cognitively. The way that GitHub approached bug tracking is one of the most frustrating examples of throwing away all progress just to start over from scratch and ignore everything that came before.
A majority of GitHub's users' first experience interacting with a bug tracker was probably on GitHub, so they never really knew any better. The rest seem to be experiencing some collective amnesia about how to effectively file and otherwise triage/manage bugs. Basically none of the issues ever stumbled upon start with a clear and anodyne set of steps to reproduce. Every "issue" is a conversation. (And this seems to be not only tolerated but encouraged. It's madness.) About half are support requests, maybe more. Even when GitHub is used "correctly" to file bona fide bugs, on the whole, project maintainers seem to treat it as a general intake area for everyone else to file issues, and the project authors themselves hardly use it as their own database for known bugs. They're all jotting down vague descriptions in a text file that stays on their local machine or something, who knows.
The entire phenomenon and attitude has to be one of the top 5 most annoying things about software development in 2020.
You are right, but I'd prefer myself something folder based. You could use the same argument to say mail clients don't need explicit folders, but most people seem to want them :)
You can do this with GitHub Projects (the Trello-like interface). For my personal projects, I use GitHub Issues as a dumping ground for ideas, which automatically go into a "Triage" (inbox) column, which I go through and assign labels and priorities every week or month depending on the project.
The downside with GitHub projects is that you can't automate based on labels so the issues need to be organised into columns manually if you have more than the simple one board with To-Do/In-Progress/Done columns setup. Though search and filters slightly helps with that.
> I'd prefer something more like an 'inbox', where issues can be filed into different categories which moves the out of the 'new' section. This is what most large projects are doing anyway with labels.
I definitely prefer this over trackers that for some inexplicable reason have different flows for bugs, requests, API comments, features and what not. The "inbox" you speak of already exists: unlabelled issues are your inbox. :)
Everything ends up in a giant "bag", where you end up with 1000+ "issues". While you can go into issues then sort by a given label, this has to be done actively, and constantly kept up to date.
I'd prefer something more like an 'inbox', where issues can be filed into different categories which moves the out of the 'new' section. This is what most large projects are doing anyway with labels.