> Most bug trackers have ways to triage submissions. When a rando submits something, it has status "unconfirmed". Developers can then recategorize it, delete it, mark it as invalid, confirm that it's a real bug and mark it "confirmed", etc.
As far as I'm aware, most large open GitHub projects use tags for that kind of classification. Would you consider that too clunky?
Absolutely. It's a patch that can achieve a similar result, but it's a patch indeed. A major features of every ticketing system, if not "the" major feature, is the ticket flow. Which should be opinionated. Customizable with the owner's opinion, but opinionated nonetheless. Using labels to cover missing areas in that flow is a clunky patch, in my book.
IMO it still has poor discoverability, constant filtering between the triage status flags and non-flagged stuff, stuff that might not have been flagged by accident, reporters putting tags on issues themselves, issues can only be closed by non-admins rather than truly deleted, random people complaining about this or that on unrelated tickets...
It all stems from the fact that all issues are in this one large pool rather than there being a completely separate list with already vetted stuff that nobody else can write into.
Sounds like it could be fixed by making it configurable to hide all issues without a certain tag (or auto-apply a hiding tag) for the issues "landing page".
With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is
not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
as they fly overhead.
Translation: sure, you can make this work by piling automation on top. But that doesn't make it a good system to begin with, and won't really result in a robust result either. I'd really rather have a better foundation to start with.
> I hate to break it to you, but all the other ticket systems do this by piling automation on top as well.
The rebuke to your comment is right in your comment: "other ticket systems do this by…"
The ticket system does it. As in, it has it built-in and/or well integrated. If GitHub had the same level of integration that other ticket systems achieve with their automation, this'd be a non-issue. But it doesn't, and it's a huge problem.
P.S.: I hate to break it to you, but "I hate to break it to you, but" is quite poor form.
No, it's not that well integrated. They don't call it 'tags' but they work exactly the same way. JIRA, the most commonly cited example in this thread, has a whole separate engine for it and your JIRA admin builds the ticket flow manually. All the way back in RT this sort of thing was handled by a cron job. Github leveraging actions to accomplish this isn't much of a difference.
They're already doing that by moving discussions to issues. In fact it's more work for them because they have to actually create the issue instead of just adding a "confirmed bug" label or whatever.
I guess it probably leads to higher quality issue descriptions at least, but otherwise this seems pretty dumb and user-hostile.
There’s a one-click button to convert from discussion to issue (and vice versa). It’s hardly more work. But I do feel like discussions are kind of hidden and out of the way on GitHub.
On repos I maintain, I use an “untriaged” label for issues and I convert questions to discussions at issue triage time.
> As far as I'm aware, most large open GitHub projects use tags for that kind of classification. Would you consider that too clunky?
Speaking for another large open GitHub project:
Absofuckinglutely yes.
I cannot overstate how bad this workflow is. There seems to be a development now in other platforms becoming more popular (gitlab, forgejo/codeberg, etc.) and I hope to god that it either forces GitHub to improve this pile of expletive or makes these "alternate" platforms not be so alternate anymore so we can move off.
The classification here is not what type of issue it is, it's whether it's an issue or not. Creating an issue for things that aren't issues is fundamentally broken. There's no way to fix that except by piling bad design on bad design to make it so that you can represent non-issues using issues and have everything still be somewhat usable.
As far as I'm aware, most large open GitHub projects use tags for that kind of classification. Would you consider that too clunky?