If it's someone else's project, they have full authority to decide what is and isn't an issue. With large enough projects, you're going to have enough bad actors, people who don't read error messages, and just downright crazy people. Throw in people using AI for dubious purposes like CVE inflation, and it's even worse.
One of my pet peeves that I will never understand.
I do not expect users to understand what an error means, but I absolutely expect them to tell me what the error says. I try to understand things from the perspective of a non-technical user, but I cannot fathom why even a non-technical user would think that they don't need to include the contents of an error message when seeking help regarding the error. Instead, it's "When I do X, I get an error".
Maybe I have too much faith in people. I've seen even software engineers become absolutely blind when dealing with errors. I had a time 10 years ago as a tester when I filed a bug ticket with explicit steps that results in a "broken pipe error". The engineer closed the ticket as "Can Not Reproduce" with a comment saying "I can't complete your steps because I'm getting a 'broken pipe error'".
Just today I've had a "technical" dude complain about something "not working".
He even checked "thing A" and "thing B" which "looked fine", but it still "didn't work". A and B had absolutely nothing to do with each either (they solve completely different problems).
I had to ask multiple times what exactly he was trying to do and what exactly he was experiencing.
I've even had "web devs" shout there must be some kind of "network problem" between their workstation and some web server, because they were getting an http 403 error.
So, yeah. Regular users? I honestly have 0 expectations from them. They just observe that the software doesn't do what they expect and they'll complain.
> I do not expect users to understand what an error means
I'm not sure I agree.
Reason ?
The old adage "handle errors gracefully".
The "gracefully" part, by definition means taking into account the UX.
Ergo "gracefully" does not mean spitting out either (a) a meaningless generic message or (b) A bunch of incomprehensible tech-speak.
Your error should provide (a) a user-friendly plain-English description and (b) an error ID that you can then cross-reference (e.g. you know "error 42" means the database connection is foobar because the password is wrong)
During your support interaction you can then guide the user through uploading logs or whatever. Preferably through an "upload to support" button you've already carefully coded into your app.
Even if your app is targetting a techie audience, its the same ethos.
If there is a possibility a techie could solve the problem themselves (e.g. by RTFM or checking the config file), then the onus is on you to provide a suitably meaningful error message to help them on their troubleshooting journey.
I've had the experience of getting to sit beside several categories of people across my career and watch them attempt to do something which is causing issues or errors. The pattern I have seen the most is what I can only describe as speedrunning the error. People will try to do the thing they (think they) know how to do. When information or error comes available on the screen, they completely ignore it; if it is a popup, it is closed as quickly as possible and if it is shown somewhere on the screen that doesn't interrupt their flow, then it is completely ignored.
I have given instructions to repeat, but more slowly, and people will still click through errors without a chance to read. I have asked people to go step by step and pause after every step so we can look at what's going on, and they will treat "do thing and close resulting error" as a single step, pausing only after having closed the error.
The only explanation I have that I can understand is that closing errors and popups is a reflex for many people, such that they don't even register doing it. I don't know if this is true or if people would agree with it.
I've seen this with programmers at all levels of seniority. I've seen it with technically capable non-programmers. I've seen it with non-technical people just trying to use some piece of software.
The only thing that's ever been effective for me is to coach people to copy all text and take screenshots of literally everything that is happening on their screen (too many narrow screenshots that obscure useful context, so I ask for whole-screen screenshots only). Some people do well with this. Some never seem to put any effort into the communication.
If I can victim-blame for a moment, I don't know what my mom is supposed to do when a streaming service on her TV says there's a problem and will she please report a GUID to the support department.
No, my mom is not eidetic, and no, she's not going to upload a photo of her living room.
Totally agree with you, though, when the full error message is at least capable of being copied to the clipboard.
The trouble here is that github issues is crap. 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. Github issues is mostly a discussion system that was so inadequate that they supplemented it with another discussion system.
> 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?
> 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.
All of this is possible on GitHub issues and is in fact done by many projects, by this metric I dont see how GitHub Issues is any different than say, JIRA. In both cases, as you mentioned, someone needs to triage those issues, which would, of course, be the developers as well. Nothing gained, nothing lost.
I take the Basecamp philosophy of, “If it’s important enough, we won’t be able to ignore it, and it’s ok for anything else to fall through the cracks until someone feels like working on it.”
Well, that’s a paraphrase, but I remember reading that rough idea on their blog years ago, and it strikes me as perfectly fine for many kinds of projects.
Discussion systems all the way down :-). This is a fair assessment of the github issues system. I suspect that because git(1) can be a change control system for anything there is never any hope of making an effective issue tracker for a particular thing it is being used to manage change on. The choice the project made to allow the developers to determine when something was an issue is essentially adding a semantic layer on top of issues that customizes it for this particular corpus of change management.
You're 100% correct. I had a CVE reported to me in ~2022, shortly after the ChatGPT launch. I spent 4 hours slicing and dicing the issue, responding to how it was wrong, linking to background information, specific lines in the code, and then asking for or what am I missing. The response was literally "shrugs AI". Good for them.
Yeah but the article / post linked does not say that they won't look at reports of bugs or security problems, just that they are using issues to manage things they have decided are issues that should be worked on, and so public reporting using issues tickets will mess up that system they have. It's purely about their project's use of the issues system in github.
Unfortunately there is no such magic bullet for trawling through bug reports from users, but pushing more work out to the reporter can be reasonably effective at avoiding that kind of time wasting. Require that the reporters communicate responsively, that they test things promptly, that they provide reproducers and exact recipes for reproduction. Ask that they run git bisect / creduce / debug options / etc. Proactively close out bugs or mark them appropriately if reporters don't do the work.
Don't forget the rude, entitled, and aggressive, they are legion.
It's simply a great idea. The mindset should be 'understand what's happening', not 'this is the software's fault'.
The discussion area also serves as a convenient explanation/exploration of the surrounding issues that is easy to find. It reduces the maintainer's workload and should be the default.
Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out. That ghostty finds discussions to be a better way to triage user requests/issues is somewhat quirky, although a perfectly valid option. As is just using issues, imo. Just good to make sure users know how to report an issue, and what information to include.
To be clear, I think discussions on the whole as a product are pretty bad. I'm not happy having to use them, but given my experience trying different approaches across multiple "popular" projects on GH, this approach has so far been the least bad. Although I'm still sad about it.
> Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out.
Agreed. This highlights GitHub's issue management system being inadequate.
I believe most of it is people expecting stuff to work differently, not having time to wrap their head around proper usage of system, because they need specific outcome and they don't need mastery of the tool.
Downside is that "Facebookization" created a trend where people expect everything to be obvious and achievable in minimal amount of clicks, without configuring anything.
Now "LLMization" will push the trend forward. If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box, why would I need to click around or type some arcane configuration for a tool?
I don't think in general it is bad - it is only bad for specialist software where you cannot use that software without deeper understanding, but the expectation is still there.
It is weird to push the idea that Facebook is some kind of pinacle of good and easy to use UI. That's the first one. It's quite the opposite, with people constantly complaining how bad, clunky and confusing Facebook is. And it is not the recent trend either. It has always been this way and e.g. VK has always had a better UI/UX that Facebook (and Telegram's is better that Whatsapp's).
> If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box
IME, people cannot even articulate what they want when the know what they want, let alone when they don’t even understand what they want in the first place.
Agreed. We have to stop this “first-class” citizen for anything but general communication platforms. This allows creating a barrier between specialists and common users.
That's a shame to hear. I had to give up on Ghostty because of its memory leak issue. Granted, it was on an 8GB system, but that should be enough to run a terminal without memory exhaustion a few times a week. Foot has been rock solid, even though it lacks some of Ghostty's niceties.
Note that this is an active discussion where we're trying to get to a point of clarity where we can promote to an issue (when it is actionable). The discussion is open and this is the system working as intended!
I want to clarify though that there isn't a known widespread "memory leak issue." You didn't say "widespread", but just in case that is taken by anyone else. :) To clarify, there are a few challenges here:
1. The report at hand seems to affect a very limited number of users (given the lack of reports and information about them). There are lots of X meme posts about Ghostty in the macOS "Force Close" window using a massive amount of RAM but that isn't directly useful because that window also reports all the RAM _child processes_ are using (e.g. if you run a command in your shell that consumes 100 GB of RAM, macOS reports it as Ghostty using 100 GB of RAM). And the window by itself also doesn't tell us what you were doing in Ghostty. It farms good engagement, though.
2. We've run Ghostty on Linux under Valgrind in a variety of configurations (the full GUI), we run all of Ghostty's unit tests under Valgrind in CI for every commit, and we've run Ghostty on macOS with the Xcode Instruments leak checker in a variety of configurations and we haven't yet been able to find any leaks. Both of these run fully clean. So, the "easy" tools can't find it.
3. Following point 1 and 2, no maintainer familiar with the codebase has ever seen leaky behavior. Some of us run a build of Ghostty, working full time in a terminal, for weeks, and memory is stable.
4. Our Discord has ~30K users, and within it, we only have one active user who periodically gets a large memory issue. They haven't been able to narrow this down to any specific reproduction and they aren't familiar enough with the codebase to debug it themselves, unfortunately. They're trying!
To be clear, I 100% believe that there is some kind of leak affecting some specific configuration of users. That's why the discussion is open and we're soliciting input. I even spent about an hour today on the latest feedback (posted earlier today) trying to use that information to narrow it down. No dice, yet.
If anyone has more info, we'd love to find this. :)
btw, is it me or is there any justification for anyone including a developer to run more than 8GB of RAM for a laptop? I don't see functionality as having changed in the last 15 years.
For me, only Rust compilation necessitates more RAM. But, I assume devs just do RAM heavy dev work on a server over ssh.
It can also be remarkably picky about GPUs, even otherwise well-supported integrated GPUs, but any discussion of this is declared a GTK problem (or an nvidia problem, even on intel).
It's not clear to me why I'd want to use Ghostty over WezTern or Kitty, TBH. Ghostty is certainly trends on social media, but that's a negative signal for me.
Personally, I find the distinction between “issues” and “discussions” annoying.
For one, it duplicates the efforts in checking for prior reports. I might try 5–6 sets of keywords, but now I have to do so for 2 separate trackers.
Tickets cannot be moved between trackers, so instead folks resort to duplicating it and moving discussions… which is entirely opaque if you’re following up via email: you won’t get any more notifications and your future replies are silently discarded.
As a maintainer, having two trackers per project never made sense to me, so I’ve disabled discussion everywhere.
This is mostly a criticism of how GitHub implemented this feature, not of the decision taken here.
I personally don’t like discussions either. I treat issues to be issues experienced by the user. It doesn’t mean that there’s an issue caused by bugs in the software. User creates an issue that turns out to be caused by user not following instructions? Just help the user and close the issue.
At the very least I think what matters here is the process. The same exact process could be implemented via, for example, issue labels. It would not be hard for maintainers to search for issues with label "bug", which only maintainers can assign. There are clear UX tradeoffs between the two approaches.
Why would checking be duplicated? One would need to check only the discussions in this case, since issues will be created from discussions once something is ready to be worked on (as I understood it)
That’s only for non-maintainer submissions. When a maintainer notices a bug or decides on a new feature, they can open an issue for that right away, without prior discussion.
I've been annoyed at this distinction myself when trying to troubleshoot problems with other Github-hosted software. I actually think the distinction Ghostty is making here where the Discussion section is open for anyone to bring up an issue with a project, and the Issues section is locked down to official maintainers and is only used for tracking well-scoped planned changes to the software (which might arise from a user-initiated discussion about a problem) makes a great deal of sense. I haven't seen any other Github-hosted project which organizes itself in exactly this way but I have zero problem with it as a user of Ghostty myself.
Does this actually work? I would think it will be out of date by at least weeks, and I'd be surprised if their crawlers actually iterate through every issue page.
As a maintainers, if you want to be be able to tell real issues from non-issue discussions, you still gave to read them (triage). That's what's taking time.
I don't see how transforming a discussion into an issue is less effort than the other way around. Both are a click.
Github's issues and discussions seem the same feature to me (almost identical UI with different naming).
The only potential benefit I can see is that discussions have a top-level upvote count.
> able to tell real issues from non-issue discussions
imo almost all issues are real, including "non-issue" - i think you mean non-bug - "discussions." for example it is meaningful that discussions show a potential documentation feature, and products like "a terminal" are complete when their features are authored and also fully documented or discoverable (so intuitive as to not require documentation).
99% of the audience of github projects are other developers, not non-programmer end users. it is almost always wrong to think of issues as not real, every open source maintainer who gets hung up on wanting a category of issues narrower than the ones needed to make their product succeed winds up delegating their product development to a team of professionals and loses control (for an example that I know well: ComfyUI).
If discussions had a more modern UI with threads or something then the difference might be real. But AFAICT it’s the same set of functionality, so it’s effectively equivalent to a tag.
Why do you say that? Curl (arguably one of the most used open source software in the world) currently has 5 open issues https://github.com/curl/curl/issues
Because I don't want my default view to be "triage." If GitHub allowed default issue views (and reflected that in the issue count in the tabs as well), then maybe. But currently, it doesn't work. I've tried it at large project scale across many (multiple projects with more than 20K stars and millions of downloads).
Compared to that, this system has been a huge success. It has its own problems, but it's directionally better.
How does different count affect search? You can use a bookmark to change the view, and if using bookmarks is too much, ok, but that's not a bold universal reason.
(also, what is "huge success" in methods of organizing issues?)
bookmark: (and if your browser supports shortcuts, it can be as easy to open as remembering to type a single char)
For one, it might require several rounds of back and forth before its ready to receive the tag, but now the details are spread across several comments instead of neatly at the top
GitHub desperately needs a feature to pin comments in issues or sort by reactions.
Very often in those infamous bugs that has been open for years, having hundreds of ”me too” comments, there are gems with workarounds or reproductions, unfortunately hidden somewhere under 4 iterations of ”click to load 8 more comments”, making it difficult to find. This generates even more ”anyone know how to solve this” spam, further contributing to the difficulty to find the good post.
that solution is not trivial because it requires permission for anyone to comment on issues, which invites irrelevant or unhelpful comments or even complaints. the separation allows issues to be limited to developers only, those who actually work to fix the issues.
technically, messages are messages. this approach no more than grouping messages into different forums. it could also all be under discussion with a sub forum for issues, one for features, one for other topics, etc, and then there would need to be a permission system for each sub forum.
so all this does is to create two spheres of access for users and developers. and that's the point.
in the end it's really a matter of taste and preference.
That's not true, you can limit comments to collaborators if you don't like them. Although note that it's something you've made up, comments are not part of the original list of reasons. Moreover, comments aren't limited in the actual issues, so nothing prevents unhelpful comments, leaving your issue unresolved
How is it not trivially solved by a discussion section? Why is your solution better for someone else's work flow? Why do you feel like you get to impose your way of doing work on an open source project?
Why do you feel like it's ok to make up nonsense about imposing? How can I impose anything on that project? Why break the expected/established workflow of users if the explanation doesn't work? Why are you asking 3 questions without answering 1?
An non-issue raised as an issue can never be closed, because the person who reported it will just open another one saying "Why did you close my issue without fixing it?" If that user is also raising valid, useful issues then you don't want to just ban them. Consequently your issues list will become unmanageable.
I agree with the general philosophy about user submissions. Browsing closed discussions looks a lot like browsing closed issues. So I'm not sure that the policy is successfully turning bug reports into discussions. But it's at least keeping Issues free from noise for contributors. Github could do more to nudge users into approaching Discussions differently. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions?discussio...
The point is the opposite, AFAICT. Any user complaint starts as a discussion. If an actionable bug report results from it, it goes to the tracker, which serves as list of problems to work on. A lot of discussions do not end this way, even though they may solve a user's issue anyway, e.g. by providing advice and reference.
Definitely discussing things could also happen in the issue tracker, and some <Actionable> tag could be used to mark issues that are ready to work upon. But I suspect that Discussions are better suited for, well, discussions, while the facilities of the issue tracker can then be used by maintainers / contributors.
Agreed. IMO, it makes sense to have a way to triage possible issues, confirm that they are, in fact, legitimate, and then create issue records to reflect them. As long as users have a way to report anomalous behavior, then, as you say, it’s really no different than using tags on issues. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
It is smart; it’s just not a qualitative improvement in many of the submitted discussions which are de facto tier one issues, which I guessed to be GitHub’s fault in the Discussions UX. Not seeing what has you feeling opposite.
Personally, I dig it! Selected parts from linked page:
"""Unlike some other projects, Ghostty does not use the issue tracker for discussion or feature requests. Instead, we use GitHub discussions for that. Once a discussion reaches a point where a well-understood, actionable item is identified, it is moved to the issue tracker. This pattern makes it easier for maintainers or contributors to find issues to work on since every issue is ready to be worked on.
This approach is based on years of experience maintaining open source projects and observing that 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves.[...]"""
I'm a fan of this. My own projects on GitHub have an action[1] which autocloses and autolocks any opened issues until they have been reviewed and accepted by me, and I only consider feature requests from sponsors.
The real miss here is that there isn't a way on GitHub to only allow maintainers to create issues, instead we are left with these subpar workarounds.
1. Set a default label for issues (e.g. “autoclose”)
2. Make your auto closing and locking logic based on that label (eg the label-actions github action)
3. As a maintainer, remember to remove the label when creating an issue!
I've seen other projects that do this, and it makes a lot of sense. A discussion forum is a good place to start. It seems though that many projects don't have the Github "discussions" activated.
I think this is ok. They attempt to add a barrier here, with the attempt to increase the quality of the issue suggested. This may not be the only goal; one may be to have fewer issues raised in total. But there may be several advantages, as well as disadvantages with that approach - it is simply a trade-off.
In particular when I maintain an open source project, I have a lack of time in general so I need to move quickly. I actually don't mind issue discussions on my project, but people can not expect me to invest a lot of time into managing all of those; whether this is a discussion or an issue directly, is not so important, but I know that some project owners don't like open issues that remain open for years. It is kind of a difference in philosophy here.
One trade off is that I am not so likely to get involved in such a project. I may start a discussion, but in general I am very chaotic and may never follow up on discussions I started, simply due to lack of time, too many things to do, forgetting too much too (I do keep notes locally, but these files just keep on growing!).
> But there may be several advantages, as well as disadvantages with that approach - it is simply a trade-off.
Above, the word _simply_ conveys a lot of meaning. This sentence, when considered alone, might be seen to imply that all trade-offs are in a sense, ok, because they are all sort of a matter of taste. This doesn't mesh with my understanding of the world. I frame it this way: for a given objective, some trade-offs are better than others.
Put in reverse, when I see a project making certain trade-offs, I don't assume those trade-offs are in service of some clearly defined objective. Often I see people and organizations mired in trade-offs that are inertial and/or unconsidered.
There is another interesting angle to consider: framing as a question it would be: «When building a product or running a project, how do I make sense of a huge variety of trade-offs?» For that, exploring the Pareto frontier can be a useful method (see [1]) because it reduces the combinatorial explosion.
In the case of Ghostty, I think its values are indeed better served by this GitHub process (which designates an issue as a clear actionable task derived from a discussion).
> Great post. This should be the default configuration, community can make discussions, contributors can make issues.
I'm not so sure. I think this sort of discussion mostly falls within the realm of bike shedding. I'll explain why.
There's such a thing as a ticket life cycle. Ticketing flows typically feature a triage/reproduction stage. Just because someone creates an issue that doesn't necessarily mean the issue exists or isn't already tracked somewhere else, or that the ticket has all the necessary and sufficient information to troubleshoot an issue. When a ticket is created, the first step is to have someone look at it and check if there's something to it. This happens even when tickets are created by internal stakeholders, such as QAs.
GitHub supports ticket labels, and the default set already cover these scenarios.
To me this discussion sounds like a project decided to update their workflow to move triage out of tickets and into a separate board. That's fine, it's the exact same thing but with a slightly more complex process. But it's the same thing.
> Great post. This should be the default configuration, community can make discussions, contributors can make issues.
1. We often say 'should' too easily. The post isn't making such a claim is it? I would shift away from saying 'should' to saying: start somewhere that works for your project, gather feedback and evidence, and adjust thoughtfully. You'll end up in a place that feels authentic.
2. If anything, I would prefer the default be random. Then projects end up being natural experiments. See [1]
3. At a meta level, this reminds me of Brian:
> Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!
Not that not being able to open a ticket is not actually an implemented feature from GitHub; they simply added this issue template to let you know that you shouldn't open one:
*DO NOT OPEN A NEW ISSUE. PLEASE USE THE DISCUSSIONS SECTION.*
*I DIDN'T READ THE ABOVE LINE. PLEASE CLOSE THIS ISSUE.*
So they are using Issues as a project board to track and manage ongoing work items, but Projects is built for exactly that. May be better in the long term to move project management to Projects and let people file bugs with as little friction as possible.
We've been doing this on the Renovate project for years, and it's been hugely useful - we get a lot of reports that users feel to be a bug, but are often misunderstanding or expectations about behaviour that isn't necessarily true.
There are absolutely bugs that get reported - either in functionality or documentation - but by requiring a level of triage in Discussions before promoting them up to Issues is a great way to keep things more actionable for folks wanting to come in and contribute fixes that the maintainers do agree are needing a fix
For those interested in social science research, there are many ways to explore this empirically. You could mix and match some of the following approaches:
1. Ask a high-quality LLM in research mode to gather empirical statistics on how different GitHub projects are setup.
2. Put human eyes on the data you find, look for patterns, see what is interesting. (I recommend reading on approaches that promote transparency about the order in which you collect data, form hypotheses, etc.)
3. Put on your anthropologist hat and do open-ended interviews with project maintainers.
This makes perfect sense and is so much better than getting a flood of half-baked "issues" and then closing them automatically with a bot for "inactivity".
People complain about Github not allowing you to turn off issues and pull requests entirely, but I've always seen it as a positive. It means the truth about code quality, potential caveats, and better forked revisions can disseminate freely even when the author disappears. It becomes a spamfest at times, but is still probably a net positive for the ecosystem.
That being said, as long as you still have the discussion tab, auto-deleting all issues by default is not a big deal.
Yes. Even for casual users looking for help, it’s nice to know that the “issues” tab is just real issues and not random, duplicated complaints and questions. Especially on a project like this that attracts a lot of attention and is highly sensitive to the user’s very specific environment. Most issues are going to not be bugs, or even something the maintainers can work on directly. Instead of trying to cram everything into Issues, why not use the underutilized Discussions tool? Now the Issues list is much more useful as an active tracker of workable items, and as a historical reference of relatively deduped problems.
One difference is that if I submit an issue, and it requires some back and forth to figure out the actionable improvement, then suddenly the issue is very noisy.
Whereas if it goes via a Discussion first, the back and forth happens elsewhere.
Arguably an separate issue could still do this, but it being a discussion sets the expectation better.
This kind of thing happens in Jira or any company's internal bug tracker, and GitHub Issues is not any different. If you want a certain kind of "hygiene", you can always do that in the existing system instead of inventing a whole different solution.
> Arguably an separate issue could still do this, but it being a discussion sets the expectation better.
It's a good idea to reserve issues for well-defined, actionable stuff.
IRL every dev issue tracker needs a front-end bozo filter to handle the low-hanging fruit and the misunderstandings and the failures to RTFM and the cases of PEBCAK.
This is the natural way to do it. I have had to use the issue tracker for asking questions (support requests) or informing the developer of something (like of implementing a related feature in another software). Clearly, those aren't issues at all, and the normal workflow steps like closing the ticket doesn't make much sense at all. They belong to the discussions list.
Issue trackers should be used exclusively for earmarking and tracking the progress of actionable items. This is somewhat similar to the integration between email clients and task managers, like how it's done in Gmail, Zoho, etc. You read the message first. If it requires an action from your side, create a task from it and link them.
There are other projects that do this too. A good example is the 'mise' project. Sourcehut projects use this workflow almost exclusively since it's the default by design. I think sourcehut had if before github did. What I would like to see is better integration between discussions/messages and task/issue lists on all these platforms.
I think this is the natural process, but how you implement it doesn't matter. A lot of GitHub repos use "unlabelled issue" === "a discussion thread". The benefit is that instead of having to search two separate systems, you can just search one (if you can have an aggregate search over both then it really doesn't matter), these two implementations are isomorphic
I don't find them equivalent or isomorphic. You are rolling a generic discussion forum and a work planner/tracker into one. In my experience, such two-in-one solutions rarely work well. Discussions and Issues tend to interfere with each others' UX significantly when there is no explicit boundary. And it looks like Mitchell Hashimoto and a lot of others feel the same way.
> 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves. For what's left, the majority are often feature requests (unimplemented features) and not bugs (malfunctioning features).
>> 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves. For what's left, the majority are often feature requests (unimplemented features) and not bugs (malfunctioning features).
> Do I ever make mistakes?
> No. It’s the users who are wrong.
This is a textbook example of being uncharitable. Framing matters a lot! If you frame something in an uncharitable way, you are likely to "lock in" that view and discount other ones. Mitchell is not saying «users are wrong to give feedback», he is merely saying «the usual conventions are not ideal for this project». Don't confuse the two.
It is clear to me that Mitchell is giving his answer to this question: «what process gives the best results for this OSS project?». He has adjusted the feedback process in a way that he thinks will give better results. This is a consequentialist framing of how to best serve the users of Ghostty, which I think is a useful lens.
I disagree. He's just trying to educate these guys about usability.
Most people by default see "user got something wrong" and respond "rtfm" or "you don't understand" or "don't make mistakes".
The vast majority of people using Ghostty are not stupid. If they misunderstood something or made a mistake, it's highly likely that it could have been avoided with changes to improve Ghostty.
Those modern terminal projects have weird defaults and quirky behaviors just to be different.
So to me it's easy to believe that a user expects something to work a certain way, does minimal or no research about it, and go directly to report a bug when in reality it's intented behavior.
I can believe this. I think it depends on the project, but there are certainly some with very high false positives. Maybe that's indicative of a confusing app, I don't know.
"Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports, but man, AI code analysis is getting really good. There are users out there reporting bugs that don't know ANYTHING about our stack, but are great AI drivers and producing some high quality issue reports.
This person (linked below) was experiencing Ghostty crashes and took it upon themselves to use AI to write a python script that can decode our crash files, match them up with our dsym files, and analyze the codebase for attempting to find the root cause, and extracted that into an Agent Skill.
They then came into Discord, warned us they don't know Zig at all, don't know macOS dev at all, don't know terminals at all, and that they used AI, but that they thought critically about the issues and believed they were real and asked if we'd accept them. I took a look at one, was impressed, and said send them all.
This fixed 4 real crashing cases that I was able to manually verify and write a fix for from someone who -- on paper -- had no fucking clue what they were talking about. And yet, they drove an AI with expert skill.
I want to call out that in addition to driving AI with expert skill, they navigated the terrain with expert skill as well. They didn't just toss slop up on our repo. They came to Discord as a human, reached out as a human, and talked to other humans about what they've done. They were careful and thoughtful about the process.
People like this give me hope for what is possible. But it really, really depends on high quality people like this. Most today -- to continue the analogy -- are unfortunately driving like a teenager who has only driven toy go-karts."
Seems great to me. Perhaps GitHub should look into incorporating this into the UX somehow? So many projects are issues linking to other issues, I would love to see other projects adopt this to make github task tracking more usable.
Why would GitHub do that just because one project thinks is a good idea, especially when there is absolutely no concrete evidence that this is any more effective or efficient than using issues? All that we have is project maintainers' own beliefs. Bear in mind that these things can be studied and measured quantitatively.
The current "issues" system works fine for most small-medium projects and even many large projects. Any project who looks for a more "serious" solution would have its own Jira/bug tracker system, and you can find plenty of them.
Intuitively, it seems like the Correct™ feature to handle the concepts of "issues" and "discussions" would be to have only one place to go to comment on a project.
There doesn't seem to be enough of a separation between the concepts of "issues" and "discussions" to support separating them into two features.
Given that discussions seem more general, it seems like the right path forward would be to have only discussions. Sub-features of issues could be added to discussions.
A lot of bugs where I work have the same pattern: one person writes up either what they found to be broken or what they couldn’t do due to a missing feature, then a shadow task is created that describes the bug and what needs to be changed to fix or implement it. I’ve never had problem with both the report and the work-tracker being in the same place but I can see why GitHub calling the product “Issues” might not have been a great name.
Yes this is the identical pattern we strive for at SQLAlchemy.
However github has no option to close issues to contributors only.
These folks do what we do, they have an issue template called "do not use this". big whoop. People blow through those all day so we're clicking on "convert to discussion" all day.
Some of it may be unintentional. I've created issues directly through the `gh` CLI before, and issue templates don't show up there at all. If I haven't actually cloned the repo (or, more frequently, if I have a sparse checkout/deleted the files to save space), I have no way of knowing that there's a template and I'll just `gh issue -R some/thing create`.
I finally moved on to the official GitHub app on mobile, but before that I used fasthub and other clients that had no idea about issue templates.
GitHub really needs to add permissions to issues, so that users can't create issues without the template; any kind of failure in creation is a sign that you're doing something wrong. The ability to add tags to issues when creating via CLI would also be helpful.
my fear is people are going to post issue reports, sometimes good ones that we need to act upon, they get autoclosed, and the submitter either never bothers to re-post or they are so annoyed that they don't re-post.
it would be way better if there was only one way for them to get their content in, in the first place
The motivation for that is very convincing, yet a quick glance at Issues tab makes me understand it without any additional explanation.
It looks great. As mentally easy to process as Jira tasks. Or even better, cause it was written by a good "PM", which is not always a case commercially.
What I often do on ZeroFS [0] is to convert issues to discussions, it's a one click operation on github and helps reduce the noise for ill-defined issues.
So how do the maintainers and contributers know when a Discussion details a bug ready to be worked on? Seems like, as with issues, they'll still be sorting though them and looking for the most active ones?
Edit: after reading the contributors doc, it seems that feature requests are discussions which should help. Unreproducible bugs, too; although I would wager that a lot of users believe they can reproduce bugs but in fact can't consistently, or believe their feature request is a bug.
It seems this approach is better but still requires someone to sort through the discussions before they're moved to the cleaner issues pile.
One big pile with filters, or a chaotic pile and a clean pile. That seems to be the end result of this, unless I'm missing something.
Thanks so much to Henryclarkethicalhacler for helping me hack into my husband's phone so I could see what he is up to and
I was able to catch him red handed, now I am out and a lot happier credit goes to earlier mention hacker for a
good job. If you are also interested in any hack job you can contact him via his email –
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Just do the Apple / Google / MS model where anyone can freely open tickets, and then those bugs are never seen or addressed by any developers. Essentially use the bug tracker as a honeypot to keep the users happy
Works for large projects with active communities (Ghostty has both). The filter pays off when volume is high. Doesn't work for smaller projects where every report matters and you want to lower barriers. The brutal honesty ("80-90% of you are wrong") is refreshing but may alienate contributors. A middle ground would be issue templates with mandatory checklists, filters without adding an extra step.
Maybe "issue" should then be renamed into "TODOs". Because end users have "issues" with a product, it is up for someone with more knowledge to identify if the "issue" is PEBKAC, WONTFIX, FEATURE, or actually a TODO for the developers.
The term "discussion" does not have anything to do with this.
I understand these are all github choices of terms, and it should also be reframed properly by github.
Sure, issues for tasks and discussions for conversations.
And then there are developers who idly complain about normal participation on the work of issues and coordination of testing and feedback because it sends them a notification that they turned on. Unconstructive bitching drives users and collaborators away. They could solve their notification problem rather than impose a burden and emotional bullshit on everyone else.
This approach is very efficient and keeps the riff raff out. I love it. Even in our internal Jira tickets, they tend to spiral into long discussions in the comments, only to end up becoming entirely new features or even change what the "bug" originally was to something new. I might try to introduce a similar idea now that I've read this. Thanks
Just the first thing that popped into my head reading the reasoning. I think it makes a lot of sense to do it like this. Especially for a product which is cross platform that emulates / replaces other known products and on top has extensive configuration options. I also switched over from kitty a couple of weeks back and really like it.
When I have a clear "Issue" which I've already researched, it's a bit of friction, but it doesn't seem like any more work to dump exactly the same text into a Discussion... and yea. Issues becoming a dumping ground is a real issue. This seems like a reasonable strategy / experiment.
I’m far from an AI booster but this sounds like a perfect job for an AI classifier to act as a gate keeper. If you can convince the AI that your bug report is sufficiently detailed to be actionable and issue gets created. Should reduce the low quality reports, crazy people and issue spam.
It's more or less what a customer of mine does with its support tickets. We receive the tickets, interact with customers, solve their problem and sometimes in the process we open one or more issues that enter into the backlog. Issues originated by a ticket usually have a high priority.
Last week a friend posted an issue to ghostty's github, and it got closed very fast - so he read this "Why users cannot create Issues directly", copied the post and pasted as discussion. Not much difference from my perspective.
Personally, I use GH Issues for my own work, but there’s very few issues, so it’s not a burden. I’m a non-fan of JIRA.
I have seen GH Issues turn into Reddit-like flamefests (every now and then, someone posts a particularly entertaining one, here). Not my idea of productive work.
@jdx has gone one step further with mise. The issues has been completely disabled. I presume he tracks real issues in another repo. It'd be nice if github could provide first class support for such a workflow.
I briefly tried to contribute to a popular AI project (a ChatGPT-like web-based interface) where I found some bugs and reported them as issues, with steps to reproduce. The maintainer closed them and moved them to discussions, which is what he did to any issue he didn't like or personally didn't believe mattered, I guess. Items in Discussions didn't get any attention, nor were follow-ups looked at. One of the issues even involved the total loss of user data on upgrade.
So this makes me think the developer here just doesn't like the idea of issues being reported on his project.
> 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves.
Who does this project actually serve? The "users", or someone else?
If I'm getting overwhelmed with hundreds of issues per week about some confusion around installation or use, I think those issues are completely justified. Something should probably be fixed if the happy path is this obscure. Pushing this reality into another bucket is not the solution for me.
As an OSS maintainer myself, while the amount of tickets about a specific topic _might_ be loosely related to the quality of the docs/installation/etc, this hasn't been true in my observations.
It's one of those explanations that sound very plausible on paper, but if you see real world issues it just doesn't happen, users will ask questions that are clearly explained in the first paragraph of the readme, en masse.
> clearly explained in the first paragraph of the readme
Yeah but people justifiably don't exhaustively read documentation. If people are getting confused because they didn't read some bit of documentation - even the first paragraph of the readme - then you shouldn't just dismiss them as stupid and bask in your superior documentation-reading abilities. You should think about how to resolve that confusion in a way that they would actually see it.
It's hard to explain how to do that without a concrete example, but it usually is possible. It's also usually more work than just replying RTFM, but you should at least be aware that you are choosing not to bother.
Let's not forget there are actual people behind open source projects. I think it is extremely rude to say those people should SERVE the users of their open source projects for free. The project "serve" the needs of the maintainers. If you as a user don't like something, that is entirely YOUR problem. Feel free to fork it and fix the bugs you think are worthy fixing.
Did you also read the part about using Discussions instead? It’s not that users are not allowed to voice feedback, make request, or ask questions. They should just do so in a different place.
> Any Discussion which clearly identifies a problem in Ghostty and can be confirmed or reproduced will be converted to an Issue by a maintainer
I don’t see how this demonstrates that at all. Issues as a concept seems sound. There is a huge variety of social structures that are built around issues which might make it a good or bad fit
I have never worked on projects that give non members write access to our bug tracker.
This includes both our open source project not giving the public access. And our entirely closed source internal projects not giving other developers within the company write access.
The stale-bots are even worse than that. The reporter may have responded quickly, and the bug may be acknowledged as real. But if there's simply no activity in the issue for the month following, it will be closed.
This is a good AI application - something which accepts user problem reports and tries to group them together. Maybe even reproducing the bug in a sandbox if the description is good enough. Engaging with the complainant to get more info.
This could be useful if not used for enshittification, where you have to get past the chatbot to reach anybody useful.
A couple of big projects in the python space use this approach. Pisses me off as a power user. I find what are clearly bugs all the time, and am forced through a funnel that places the burden on me. Stinks of arrogance to think your project is that rock solid you should add friction for reporting bugs. Especially in “forever v0” projects.
Arrogance? Those people are spending their time and effort on an open source project, without asking a penny in return. I think they are entitled to have restrictions on how bugs should be reported.
In the python projects in question, unlike with the Ghostty project, there isn't an "issue triage" discussion category that maintainers look at. They have just discussions, and everything is treated as such. So when you raise an issue in discussions, it either goes to the void or people come in looking for a discussion of alternative approaches to do what you're trying to do that don't hit the bug, rather than treating the bug as a bug.
At a high level - the audience of discussions is the community at large, the audience of issues is the maintainers.
What Ghostty is doing with a dedicated category for issue triage should work just fine, despite it being an additional hop.
There's zero entitlement expressed by the parent, he's just trying to help the project, but is encountering unnecessary friction.
It's not that he has some inner urge to contribute in some way, he just encountered a bug while using the software and wants to report it. The alternative isn't coding — it's no contribution at all.
This is like being forced to pay 50 bucks to your apartment because someone else broke the door. Then when you complain about it people tell you you’re entitled!
Fwiw, you might have misinterpreted the idiomatic expression "all the time" as meaning "100% of the time". It just means "often" or "commonly". The parent is just saying they often find bugs, they know they're bugs through experience.
Of course anyone can make a mistake. Maybe you prefer the 'discussions' route because it's only seemingly then possible for a projects own devs to make a mistake in creating an issue.
To be clear, I am not telling Mitchell how to run his project. I am providing info on how a change like this can be perceived from the other side. Do with the information what you will.
100% agree.
If it's someone else's project, they have full authority to decide what is and isn't an issue. With large enough projects, you're going to have enough bad actors, people who don't read error messages, and just downright crazy people. Throw in people using AI for dubious purposes like CVE inflation, and it's even worse.
> people who don't read error messages
One of my pet peeves that I will never understand.
I do not expect users to understand what an error means, but I absolutely expect them to tell me what the error says. I try to understand things from the perspective of a non-technical user, but I cannot fathom why even a non-technical user would think that they don't need to include the contents of an error message when seeking help regarding the error. Instead, it's "When I do X, I get an error".
Maybe I have too much faith in people. I've seen even software engineers become absolutely blind when dealing with errors. I had a time 10 years ago as a tester when I filed a bug ticket with explicit steps that results in a "broken pipe error". The engineer closed the ticket as "Can Not Reproduce" with a comment saying "I can't complete your steps because I'm getting a 'broken pipe error'".
Just today I've had a "technical" dude complain about something "not working".
He even checked "thing A" and "thing B" which "looked fine", but it still "didn't work". A and B had absolutely nothing to do with each either (they solve completely different problems).
I had to ask multiple times what exactly he was trying to do and what exactly he was experiencing.
I've even had "web devs" shout there must be some kind of "network problem" between their workstation and some web server, because they were getting an http 403 error.
So, yeah. Regular users? I honestly have 0 expectations from them. They just observe that the software doesn't do what they expect and they'll complain.
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My theory is that the best, absolute best predictor if someone could be a good programmer (or is) is the ability to read exactly what is written.
Is not math, logic or any of that asides. Is the actual ability to read, exactly, without adding or removing anything.
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> I do not expect users to understand what an error means
I'm not sure I agree.
Reason ?
The old adage "handle errors gracefully".
The "gracefully" part, by definition means taking into account the UX.
Ergo "gracefully" does not mean spitting out either (a) a meaningless generic message or (b) A bunch of incomprehensible tech-speak.
Your error should provide (a) a user-friendly plain-English description and (b) an error ID that you can then cross-reference (e.g. you know "error 42" means the database connection is foobar because the password is wrong)
During your support interaction you can then guide the user through uploading logs or whatever. Preferably through an "upload to support" button you've already carefully coded into your app.
Even if your app is targetting a techie audience, its the same ethos.
If there is a possibility a techie could solve the problem themselves (e.g. by RTFM or checking the config file), then the onus is on you to provide a suitably meaningful error message to help them on their troubleshooting journey.
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I've had the experience of getting to sit beside several categories of people across my career and watch them attempt to do something which is causing issues or errors. The pattern I have seen the most is what I can only describe as speedrunning the error. People will try to do the thing they (think they) know how to do. When information or error comes available on the screen, they completely ignore it; if it is a popup, it is closed as quickly as possible and if it is shown somewhere on the screen that doesn't interrupt their flow, then it is completely ignored.
I have given instructions to repeat, but more slowly, and people will still click through errors without a chance to read. I have asked people to go step by step and pause after every step so we can look at what's going on, and they will treat "do thing and close resulting error" as a single step, pausing only after having closed the error.
The only explanation I have that I can understand is that closing errors and popups is a reflex for many people, such that they don't even register doing it. I don't know if this is true or if people would agree with it.
I've seen this with programmers at all levels of seniority. I've seen it with technically capable non-programmers. I've seen it with non-technical people just trying to use some piece of software.
The only thing that's ever been effective for me is to coach people to copy all text and take screenshots of literally everything that is happening on their screen (too many narrow screenshots that obscure useful context, so I ask for whole-screen screenshots only). Some people do well with this. Some never seem to put any effort into the communication.
If I can victim-blame for a moment, I don't know what my mom is supposed to do when a streaming service on her TV says there's a problem and will she please report a GUID to the support department.
No, my mom is not eidetic, and no, she's not going to upload a photo of her living room.
Totally agree with you, though, when the full error message is at least capable of being copied to the clipboard.
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Joel Spolsky solved this over 25 years ago https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...
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> Instead, it's "When I do X, I get an error".
Worse still, just “it doesn’t work” without even any steps.
I sometimes gave those users an analogy like going to the doctor or a mechanic and not providing enough information, but I don’t think it worked.
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The trouble here is that github issues is crap. 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. Github issues is mostly a discussion system that was so inadequate that they supplemented it with another discussion system.
> 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?
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> 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.
All of this is possible on GitHub issues and is in fact done by many projects, by this metric I dont see how GitHub Issues is any different than say, JIRA. In both cases, as you mentioned, someone needs to triage those issues, which would, of course, be the developers as well. Nothing gained, nothing lost.
Having used many issue trackers over the years (JIRA, custom tools, GH Issues), I've found GitHub issues to be very usable.
Especially with the new features added last year (parent tickets, better boolean search etc) although I'm not sure if you need to opt in to get those.
In fact, it's become our primary issue tracker at work.
I take the Basecamp philosophy of, “If it’s important enough, we won’t be able to ignore it, and it’s ok for anything else to fall through the cracks until someone feels like working on it.”
Well, that’s a paraphrase, but I remember reading that rough idea on their blog years ago, and it strikes me as perfectly fine for many kinds of projects.
Discussion systems all the way down :-). This is a fair assessment of the github issues system. I suspect that because git(1) can be a change control system for anything there is never any hope of making an effective issue tracker for a particular thing it is being used to manage change on. The choice the project made to allow the developers to determine when something was an issue is essentially adding a semantic layer on top of issues that customizes it for this particular corpus of change management.
You're 100% correct. I had a CVE reported to me in ~2022, shortly after the ChatGPT launch. I spent 4 hours slicing and dicing the issue, responding to how it was wrong, linking to background information, specific lines in the code, and then asking for or what am I missing. The response was literally "shrugs AI". Good for them.
Yeah but the article / post linked does not say that they won't look at reports of bugs or security problems, just that they are using issues to manage things they have decided are issues that should be worked on, and so public reporting using issues tickets will mess up that system they have. It's purely about their project's use of the issues system in github.
Unfortunately there is no such magic bullet for trawling through bug reports from users, but pushing more work out to the reporter can be reasonably effective at avoiding that kind of time wasting. Require that the reporters communicate responsively, that they test things promptly, that they provide reproducers and exact recipes for reproduction. Ask that they run git bisect / creduce / debug options / etc. Proactively close out bugs or mark them appropriately if reporters don't do the work.
Don't forget the rude, entitled, and aggressive, they are legion.
It's simply a great idea. The mindset should be 'understand what's happening', not 'this is the software's fault'.
The discussion area also serves as a convenient explanation/exploration of the surrounding issues that is easy to find. It reduces the maintainer's workload and should be the default.
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Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out. That ghostty finds discussions to be a better way to triage user requests/issues is somewhat quirky, although a perfectly valid option. As is just using issues, imo. Just good to make sure users know how to report an issue, and what information to include.
To be clear, I think discussions on the whole as a product are pretty bad. I'm not happy having to use them, but given my experience trying different approaches across multiple "popular" projects on GH, this approach has so far been the least bad. Although I'm still sad about it.
> Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out.
Agreed. This highlights GitHub's issue management system being inadequate.
(Note: I'm the creator/lead of Ghostty)
I believe most of it is people expecting stuff to work differently, not having time to wrap their head around proper usage of system, because they need specific outcome and they don't need mastery of the tool.
Downside is that "Facebookization" created a trend where people expect everything to be obvious and achievable in minimal amount of clicks, without configuring anything.
Now "LLMization" will push the trend forward. If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box, why would I need to click around or type some arcane configuration for a tool?
I don't think in general it is bad - it is only bad for specialist software where you cannot use that software without deeper understanding, but the expectation is still there.
It is weird to push the idea that Facebook is some kind of pinacle of good and easy to use UI. That's the first one. It's quite the opposite, with people constantly complaining how bad, clunky and confusing Facebook is. And it is not the recent trend either. It has always been this way and e.g. VK has always had a better UI/UX that Facebook (and Telegram's is better that Whatsapp's).
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> If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box
IME, people cannot even articulate what they want when the know what they want, let alone when they don’t even understand what they want in the first place.
Agreed. We have to stop this “first-class” citizen for anything but general communication platforms. This allows creating a barrier between specialists and common users.
For example, memory leak investigation is currently spread across discussions, x/twitter and discord https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2004938171038277708 https://x.com/alxfazio/status/2004841392645050601 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/10114 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/9962
but has not graduated to issue worthy status
That's a shame to hear. I had to give up on Ghostty because of its memory leak issue. Granted, it was on an 8GB system, but that should be enough to run a terminal without memory exhaustion a few times a week. Foot has been rock solid, even though it lacks some of Ghostty's niceties.
Note that this is an active discussion where we're trying to get to a point of clarity where we can promote to an issue (when it is actionable). The discussion is open and this is the system working as intended!
I want to clarify though that there isn't a known widespread "memory leak issue." You didn't say "widespread", but just in case that is taken by anyone else. :) To clarify, there are a few challenges here:
1. The report at hand seems to affect a very limited number of users (given the lack of reports and information about them). There are lots of X meme posts about Ghostty in the macOS "Force Close" window using a massive amount of RAM but that isn't directly useful because that window also reports all the RAM _child processes_ are using (e.g. if you run a command in your shell that consumes 100 GB of RAM, macOS reports it as Ghostty using 100 GB of RAM). And the window by itself also doesn't tell us what you were doing in Ghostty. It farms good engagement, though.
2. We've run Ghostty on Linux under Valgrind in a variety of configurations (the full GUI), we run all of Ghostty's unit tests under Valgrind in CI for every commit, and we've run Ghostty on macOS with the Xcode Instruments leak checker in a variety of configurations and we haven't yet been able to find any leaks. Both of these run fully clean. So, the "easy" tools can't find it.
3. Following point 1 and 2, no maintainer familiar with the codebase has ever seen leaky behavior. Some of us run a build of Ghostty, working full time in a terminal, for weeks, and memory is stable.
4. Our Discord has ~30K users, and within it, we only have one active user who periodically gets a large memory issue. They haven't been able to narrow this down to any specific reproduction and they aren't familiar enough with the codebase to debug it themselves, unfortunately. They're trying!
To be clear, I 100% believe that there is some kind of leak affecting some specific configuration of users. That's why the discussion is open and we're soliciting input. I even spent about an hour today on the latest feedback (posted earlier today) trying to use that information to narrow it down. No dice, yet.
If anyone has more info, we'd love to find this. :)
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I’m sure they would appreciate a report as it doesn’t seem that it can be reproduced yet
btw, is it me or is there any justification for anyone including a developer to run more than 8GB of RAM for a laptop? I don't see functionality as having changed in the last 15 years.
For me, only Rust compilation necessitates more RAM. But, I assume devs just do RAM heavy dev work on a server over ssh.
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The author says in the first link he only heard it reported twice, which I'm guessing is the latter two links (the two discussions)
Your second link looks like an X user trying to start a flamewar; the rest of the replies are hidden to me.
For those who have the issue.
I reported the issue in discussions some time ago, but had no reaction/response.
I was able to reproduce the leak consistently. Finally I've got all the reports done by me, Ghostty sources and Claude Code and tried to fix it.
For the first couple of weeks there were no leaks at all, now it started again but only 1/10 of the times it was before.
https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/9786 There are some logs and a Claude Code review md file that might be useful.
Hope it will help someone investigate further.
It can also be remarkably picky about GPUs, even otherwise well-supported integrated GPUs, but any discussion of this is declared a GTK problem (or an nvidia problem, even on intel).
It's not clear to me why I'd want to use Ghostty over WezTern or Kitty, TBH. Ghostty is certainly trends on social media, but that's a negative signal for me.
Seems like the contributors don't feel like it's clear enough yet to make an actionable issue and needs more discussion. Are you a contributor?
Personally, I find the distinction between “issues” and “discussions” annoying.
For one, it duplicates the efforts in checking for prior reports. I might try 5–6 sets of keywords, but now I have to do so for 2 separate trackers.
Tickets cannot be moved between trackers, so instead folks resort to duplicating it and moving discussions… which is entirely opaque if you’re following up via email: you won’t get any more notifications and your future replies are silently discarded.
As a maintainer, having two trackers per project never made sense to me, so I’ve disabled discussion everywhere.
This is mostly a criticism of how GitHub implemented this feature, not of the decision taken here.
> I find the distinction between “issues” and “discussions” annoying
The benefit is that all users who just ask for help, assistance, or are unable to install or use the software now have a place to ask.
You shouldn't create an issue just because you get an error when installing, but it might be beneficial to still ask for help.
If it is indeed a bug, then create a ticket, linking to the discussion.
Normally, too many issues are user errors.
I personally don’t like discussions either. I treat issues to be issues experienced by the user. It doesn’t mean that there’s an issue caused by bugs in the software. User creates an issue that turns out to be caused by user not following instructions? Just help the user and close the issue.
At the very least I think what matters here is the process. The same exact process could be implemented via, for example, issue labels. It would not be hard for maintainers to search for issues with label "bug", which only maintainers can assign. There are clear UX tradeoffs between the two approaches.
Why would checking be duplicated? One would need to check only the discussions in this case, since issues will be created from discussions once something is ready to be worked on (as I understood it)
That’s only for non-maintainer submissions. When a maintainer notices a bug or decides on a new feature, they can open an issue for that right away, without prior discussion.
> Tickets cannot be moved between trackers
You can convert an issue to a discussion and vice versa, so no duplication is needed and your notification should be preserved.
Or do you mean something else?
I've been annoyed at this distinction myself when trying to troubleshoot problems with other Github-hosted software. I actually think the distinction Ghostty is making here where the Discussion section is open for anyone to bring up an issue with a project, and the Issues section is locked down to official maintainers and is only used for tracking well-scoped planned changes to the software (which might arise from a user-initiated discussion about a problem) makes a great deal of sense. I haven't seen any other Github-hosted project which organizes itself in exactly this way but I have zero problem with it as a user of Ghostty myself.
behold the best way to search github issues. Using Google or whatever decent search engine:
Does this actually work? I would think it will be out of date by at least weeks, and I'd be surprised if their crawlers actually iterate through every issue page.
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Issues simply don't scale. Using discussions as a filter is a good idea.
If you spend more time closing issues than creating them manually from discussions, the math adds up.
What is the actual difference?
As a maintainers, if you want to be be able to tell real issues from non-issue discussions, you still gave to read them (triage). That's what's taking time.
I don't see how transforming a discussion into an issue is less effort than the other way around. Both are a click.
Github's issues and discussions seem the same feature to me (almost identical UI with different naming).
The only potential benefit I can see is that discussions have a top-level upvote count.
> able to tell real issues from non-issue discussions
imo almost all issues are real, including "non-issue" - i think you mean non-bug - "discussions." for example it is meaningful that discussions show a potential documentation feature, and products like "a terminal" are complete when their features are authored and also fully documented or discoverable (so intuitive as to not require documentation).
99% of the audience of github projects are other developers, not non-programmer end users. it is almost always wrong to think of issues as not real, every open source maintainer who gets hung up on wanting a category of issues narrower than the ones needed to make their product succeed winds up delegating their product development to a team of professionals and loses control (for an example that I know well: ComfyUI).
If discussions had a more modern UI with threads or something then the difference might be real. But AFAICT it’s the same set of functionality, so it’s effectively equivalent to a tag.
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> If you spend more time closing issues than creating them manually from discussions, the math adds up.
The math is even better if you just ignore all issues and close them after two weeks for being stale!
Wish this was /s but it isn't.
As long as it does not affect the metrics of your resume! /s
Why do you say that? Curl (arguably one of the most used open source software in the world) currently has 5 open issues https://github.com/curl/curl/issues
Not sure curl is a good example since it’s already very mature and boring (in a good way)
> This pattern makes it easier for maintainers or contributors to find issues to work on since every issue is ready to be worked on.
How is this not trivially solved via a "ready-to-be-worked-on" tag?
Because I don't want my default view to be "triage." If GitHub allowed default issue views (and reflected that in the issue count in the tabs as well), then maybe. But currently, it doesn't work. I've tried it at large project scale across many (multiple projects with more than 20K stars and millions of downloads).
Compared to that, this system has been a huge success. It has its own problems, but it's directionally better.
Can't you just set a bookmark with the filters you want?
How does different count affect search? You can use a bookmark to change the view, and if using bookmarks is too much, ok, but that's not a bold universal reason.
(also, what is "huge success" in methods of organizing issues?)
bookmark: (and if your browser supports shortcuts, it can be as easy to open as remembering to type a single char)
https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues?q=is%3Aissue%2...
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Seems like a pretty huge cost just because you don't want to create a bookmark...
For one, it might require several rounds of back and forth before its ready to receive the tag, but now the details are spread across several comments instead of neatly at the top
GitHub desperately needs a feature to pin comments in issues or sort by reactions.
Very often in those infamous bugs that has been open for years, having hundreds of ”me too” comments, there are gems with workarounds or reproductions, unfortunately hidden somewhere under 4 iterations of ”click to load 8 more comments”, making it difficult to find. This generates even more ”anyone know how to solve this” spam, further contributing to the difficulty to find the good post.
No, you can always summarize details neatly at the top, you can edit comments, you know?
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Don't worry, I'm willing to bet that there's an AI integration in the works for this...
that solution is not trivial because it requires permission for anyone to comment on issues, which invites irrelevant or unhelpful comments or even complaints. the separation allows issues to be limited to developers only, those who actually work to fix the issues.
technically, messages are messages. this approach no more than grouping messages into different forums. it could also all be under discussion with a sub forum for issues, one for features, one for other topics, etc, and then there would need to be a permission system for each sub forum.
so all this does is to create two spheres of access for users and developers. and that's the point.
in the end it's really a matter of taste and preference.
That's not true, you can limit comments to collaborators if you don't like them. Although note that it's something you've made up, comments are not part of the original list of reasons. Moreover, comments aren't limited in the actual issues, so nothing prevents unhelpful comments, leaving your issue unresolved
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How is it not trivially solved by a discussion section? Why is your solution better for someone else's work flow? Why do you feel like you get to impose your way of doing work on an open source project?
Why do you feel like it's ok to make up nonsense about imposing? How can I impose anything on that project? Why break the expected/established workflow of users if the explanation doesn't work? Why are you asking 3 questions without answering 1?
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An non-issue raised as an issue can never be closed, because the person who reported it will just open another one saying "Why did you close my issue without fixing it?" If that user is also raising valid, useful issues then you don't want to just ban them. Consequently your issues list will become unmanageable.
Reporting valid issues does not grant you the right to abuse the issue tracker.
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I agree with the general philosophy about user submissions. Browsing closed discussions looks a lot like browsing closed issues. So I'm not sure that the policy is successfully turning bug reports into discussions. But it's at least keeping Issues free from noise for contributors. Github could do more to nudge users into approaching Discussions differently. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions?discussio...
The point is the opposite, AFAICT. Any user complaint starts as a discussion. If an actionable bug report results from it, it goes to the tracker, which serves as list of problems to work on. A lot of discussions do not end this way, even though they may solve a user's issue anyway, e.g. by providing advice and reference.
Definitely discussing things could also happen in the issue tracker, and some <Actionable> tag could be used to mark issues that are ready to work upon. But I suspect that Discussions are better suited for, well, discussions, while the facilities of the issue tracker can then be used by maintainers / contributors.
I find this separation pretty smart.
Agreed. IMO, it makes sense to have a way to triage possible issues, confirm that they are, in fact, legitimate, and then create issue records to reflect them. As long as users have a way to report anomalous behavior, then, as you say, it’s really no different than using tags on issues. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
It is smart; it’s just not a qualitative improvement in many of the submitted discussions which are de facto tier one issues, which I guessed to be GitHub’s fault in the Discussions UX. Not seeing what has you feeling opposite.
Personally, I dig it! Selected parts from linked page:
"""Unlike some other projects, Ghostty does not use the issue tracker for discussion or feature requests. Instead, we use GitHub discussions for that. Once a discussion reaches a point where a well-understood, actionable item is identified, it is moved to the issue tracker. This pattern makes it easier for maintainers or contributors to find issues to work on since every issue is ready to be worked on.
This approach is based on years of experience maintaining open source projects and observing that 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves.[...]"""
Kind of an unstructured Basecamp ShapeUp where the "ask" has been shaped already through requirements gathering and bets made.
I proposed something similar for bitcoin: https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CABaSBax-meEsC2013zKYJnC3ph...
I'm a fan of this. My own projects on GitHub have an action[1] which autocloses and autolocks any opened issues until they have been reviewed and accepted by me, and I only consider feature requests from sponsors.
The real miss here is that there isn't a way on GitHub to only allow maintainers to create issues, instead we are left with these subpar workarounds.
[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/blob/master/.github/workf...
1. Set a default label for issues (e.g. “autoclose”) 2. Make your auto closing and locking logic based on that label (eg the label-actions github action) 3. As a maintainer, remember to remove the label when creating an issue!
I've seen other projects that do this, and it makes a lot of sense. A discussion forum is a good place to start. It seems though that many projects don't have the Github "discussions" activated.
I think this is ok. They attempt to add a barrier here, with the attempt to increase the quality of the issue suggested. This may not be the only goal; one may be to have fewer issues raised in total. But there may be several advantages, as well as disadvantages with that approach - it is simply a trade-off.
In particular when I maintain an open source project, I have a lack of time in general so I need to move quickly. I actually don't mind issue discussions on my project, but people can not expect me to invest a lot of time into managing all of those; whether this is a discussion or an issue directly, is not so important, but I know that some project owners don't like open issues that remain open for years. It is kind of a difference in philosophy here.
One trade off is that I am not so likely to get involved in such a project. I may start a discussion, but in general I am very chaotic and may never follow up on discussions I started, simply due to lack of time, too many things to do, forgetting too much too (I do keep notes locally, but these files just keep on growing!).
> But there may be several advantages, as well as disadvantages with that approach - it is simply a trade-off.
Above, the word _simply_ conveys a lot of meaning. This sentence, when considered alone, might be seen to imply that all trade-offs are in a sense, ok, because they are all sort of a matter of taste. This doesn't mesh with my understanding of the world. I frame it this way: for a given objective, some trade-offs are better than others.
Put in reverse, when I see a project making certain trade-offs, I don't assume those trade-offs are in service of some clearly defined objective. Often I see people and organizations mired in trade-offs that are inertial and/or unconsidered.
There is another interesting angle to consider: framing as a question it would be: «When building a product or running a project, how do I make sense of a huge variety of trade-offs?» For that, exploring the Pareto frontier can be a useful method (see [1]) because it reduces the combinatorial explosion.
In the case of Ghostty, I think its values are indeed better served by this GitHub process (which designates an issue as a clear actionable task derived from a discussion).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front
Great post. This should be the default configuration, community can make discussions, contributors can make issues.
> Great post. This should be the default configuration, community can make discussions, contributors can make issues.
I'm not so sure. I think this sort of discussion mostly falls within the realm of bike shedding. I'll explain why.
There's such a thing as a ticket life cycle. Ticketing flows typically feature a triage/reproduction stage. Just because someone creates an issue that doesn't necessarily mean the issue exists or isn't already tracked somewhere else, or that the ticket has all the necessary and sufficient information to troubleshoot an issue. When a ticket is created, the first step is to have someone look at it and check if there's something to it. This happens even when tickets are created by internal stakeholders, such as QAs.
GitHub supports ticket labels, and the default set already cover these scenarios.
https://docs.github.com/en/issues/using-labels-and-milestone...
To me this discussion sounds like a project decided to update their workflow to move triage out of tickets and into a separate board. That's fine, it's the exact same thing but with a slightly more complex process. But it's the same thing.
> Great post. This should be the default configuration, community can make discussions, contributors can make issues.
1. We often say 'should' too easily. The post isn't making such a claim is it? I would shift away from saying 'should' to saying: start somewhere that works for your project, gather feedback and evidence, and adjust thoughtfully. You'll end up in a place that feels authentic.
2. If anything, I would prefer the default be random. Then projects end up being natural experiments. See [1]
3. At a meta level, this reminds me of Brian:
> Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!
> Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
> Brian: You're all different!
> Crowd: Yes, we are all different!
> Man in crowd: I'm not...
> Crowd: Shhh!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment
Not that not being able to open a ticket is not actually an implemented feature from GitHub; they simply added this issue template to let you know that you shouldn't open one:
*DO NOT OPEN A NEW ISSUE. PLEASE USE THE DISCUSSIONS SECTION.*
*I DIDN'T READ THE ABOVE LINE. PLEASE CLOSE THIS ISSUE.*
Reminds me of EggDrop (famous old IRC bot written in Tcl) with lots of "die" in the configuration file. :D
So they are using Issues as a project board to track and manage ongoing work items, but Projects is built for exactly that. May be better in the long term to move project management to Projects and let people file bugs with as little friction as possible.
Yet another great suggestion to consider! Thanks. Mind sharing some Github repos that use projects in this way?... that you think are good exemplars?
We've been doing this on the Renovate project for years, and it's been hugely useful - we get a lot of reports that users feel to be a bug, but are often misunderstanding or expectations about behaviour that isn't necessarily true.
There are absolutely bugs that get reported - either in functionality or documentation - but by requiring a level of triage in Discussions before promoting them up to Issues is a great way to keep things more actionable for folks wanting to come in and contribute fixes that the maintainers do agree are needing a fix
I've written some more about why we've settled on this: https://www.jvt.me/posts/2026/01/07/renovate-why-discussions...
How about using issue types? https://docs.github.com/en/issues/tracking-your-work-with-is...
For those interested in social science research, there are many ways to explore this empirically. You could mix and match some of the following approaches:
1. Ask a high-quality LLM in research mode to gather empirical statistics on how different GitHub projects are setup.
2. Put human eyes on the data you find, look for patterns, see what is interesting. (I recommend reading on approaches that promote transparency about the order in which you collect data, form hypotheses, etc.)
3. Put on your anthropologist hat and do open-ended interviews with project maintainers.
And so on.
This makes perfect sense and is so much better than getting a flood of half-baked "issues" and then closing them automatically with a bot for "inactivity".
People complain about Github not allowing you to turn off issues and pull requests entirely, but I've always seen it as a positive. It means the truth about code quality, potential caveats, and better forked revisions can disseminate freely even when the author disappears. It becomes a spamfest at times, but is still probably a net positive for the ecosystem.
That being said, as long as you still have the discussion tab, auto-deleting all issues by default is not a big deal.
Is this fundamentally different than just using tags on issues to separate ready to work on things from initial user submissions?
I feel like "technically, no" but "practically, yes".
Somehow the distinction of just adding a tag / using filters doesn't communicate the cultural/process distinction in the same way.
Yes. Even for casual users looking for help, it’s nice to know that the “issues” tab is just real issues and not random, duplicated complaints and questions. Especially on a project like this that attracts a lot of attention and is highly sensitive to the user’s very specific environment. Most issues are going to not be bugs, or even something the maintainers can work on directly. Instead of trying to cram everything into Issues, why not use the underutilized Discussions tool? Now the Issues list is much more useful as an active tracker of workable items, and as a historical reference of relatively deduped problems.
One difference is that if I submit an issue, and it requires some back and forth to figure out the actionable improvement, then suddenly the issue is very noisy.
Whereas if it goes via a Discussion first, the back and forth happens elsewhere.
Arguably an separate issue could still do this, but it being a discussion sets the expectation better.
This kind of thing happens in Jira or any company's internal bug tracker, and GitHub Issues is not any different. If you want a certain kind of "hygiene", you can always do that in the existing system instead of inventing a whole different solution.
> Arguably an separate issue could still do this, but it being a discussion sets the expectation better.
People do that all the time in bug trackers.
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It's a good idea to reserve issues for well-defined, actionable stuff.
IRL every dev issue tracker needs a front-end bozo filter to handle the low-hanging fruit and the misunderstandings and the failures to RTFM and the cases of PEBCAK.
This is the natural way to do it. I have had to use the issue tracker for asking questions (support requests) or informing the developer of something (like of implementing a related feature in another software). Clearly, those aren't issues at all, and the normal workflow steps like closing the ticket doesn't make much sense at all. They belong to the discussions list.
Issue trackers should be used exclusively for earmarking and tracking the progress of actionable items. This is somewhat similar to the integration between email clients and task managers, like how it's done in Gmail, Zoho, etc. You read the message first. If it requires an action from your side, create a task from it and link them.
There are other projects that do this too. A good example is the 'mise' project. Sourcehut projects use this workflow almost exclusively since it's the default by design. I think sourcehut had if before github did. What I would like to see is better integration between discussions/messages and task/issue lists on all these platforms.
I think this is the natural process, but how you implement it doesn't matter. A lot of GitHub repos use "unlabelled issue" === "a discussion thread". The benefit is that instead of having to search two separate systems, you can just search one (if you can have an aggregate search over both then it really doesn't matter), these two implementations are isomorphic
I don't find them equivalent or isomorphic. You are rolling a generic discussion forum and a work planner/tracker into one. In my experience, such two-in-one solutions rarely work well. Discussions and Issues tend to interfere with each others' UX significantly when there is no explicit boundary. And it looks like Mitchell Hashimoto and a lot of others feel the same way.
> 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves. For what's left, the majority are often feature requests (unimplemented features) and not bugs (malfunctioning features).
Do I ever make mistakes?
No. It’s the users who are wrong.
>> 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves. For what's left, the majority are often feature requests (unimplemented features) and not bugs (malfunctioning features).
> Do I ever make mistakes?
> No. It’s the users who are wrong.
This is a textbook example of being uncharitable. Framing matters a lot! If you frame something in an uncharitable way, you are likely to "lock in" that view and discount other ones. Mitchell is not saying «users are wrong to give feedback», he is merely saying «the usual conventions are not ideal for this project». Don't confuse the two.
It is clear to me that Mitchell is giving his answer to this question: «what process gives the best results for this OSS project?». He has adjusted the feedback process in a way that he thinks will give better results. This is a consequentialist framing of how to best serve the users of Ghostty, which I think is a useful lens.
I disagree. He's just trying to educate these guys about usability.
Most people by default see "user got something wrong" and respond "rtfm" or "you don't understand" or "don't make mistakes".
The vast majority of people using Ghostty are not stupid. If they misunderstood something or made a mistake, it's highly likely that it could have been avoided with changes to improve Ghostty.
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Those modern terminal projects have weird defaults and quirky behaviors just to be different.
So to me it's easy to believe that a user expects something to work a certain way, does minimal or no research about it, and go directly to report a bug when in reality it's intented behavior.
I can believe this. I think it depends on the project, but there are certainly some with very high false positives. Maybe that's indicative of a confusing app, I don't know.
I think the main point is that all issues are ready for contributors to work on
2025-12-30 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2006114026191769924
"Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports, but man, AI code analysis is getting really good. There are users out there reporting bugs that don't know ANYTHING about our stack, but are great AI drivers and producing some high quality issue reports.
This person (linked below) was experiencing Ghostty crashes and took it upon themselves to use AI to write a python script that can decode our crash files, match them up with our dsym files, and analyze the codebase for attempting to find the root cause, and extracted that into an Agent Skill.
They then came into Discord, warned us they don't know Zig at all, don't know macOS dev at all, don't know terminals at all, and that they used AI, but that they thought critically about the issues and believed they were real and asked if we'd accept them. I took a look at one, was impressed, and said send them all.
This fixed 4 real crashing cases that I was able to manually verify and write a fix for from someone who -- on paper -- had no fucking clue what they were talking about. And yet, they drove an AI with expert skill.
I want to call out that in addition to driving AI with expert skill, they navigated the terrain with expert skill as well. They didn't just toss slop up on our repo. They came to Discord as a human, reached out as a human, and talked to other humans about what they've done. They were careful and thoughtful about the process.
People like this give me hope for what is possible. But it really, really depends on high quality people like this. Most today -- to continue the analogy -- are unfortunately driving like a teenager who has only driven toy go-karts."
"Examples: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions?discussio... "
Seems great to me. Perhaps GitHub should look into incorporating this into the UX somehow? So many projects are issues linking to other issues, I would love to see other projects adopt this to make github task tracking more usable.
Why would GitHub do that just because one project thinks is a good idea, especially when there is absolutely no concrete evidence that this is any more effective or efficient than using issues? All that we have is project maintainers' own beliefs. Bear in mind that these things can be studied and measured quantitatively.
The current "issues" system works fine for most small-medium projects and even many large projects. Any project who looks for a more "serious" solution would have its own Jira/bug tracker system, and you can find plenty of them.
Intuitively, it seems like the Correct™ feature to handle the concepts of "issues" and "discussions" would be to have only one place to go to comment on a project.
There doesn't seem to be enough of a separation between the concepts of "issues" and "discussions" to support separating them into two features.
Given that discussions seem more general, it seems like the right path forward would be to have only discussions. Sub-features of issues could be added to discussions.
A lot of bugs where I work have the same pattern: one person writes up either what they found to be broken or what they couldn’t do due to a missing feature, then a shadow task is created that describes the bug and what needs to be changed to fix or implement it. I’ve never had problem with both the report and the work-tracker being in the same place but I can see why GitHub calling the product “Issues” might not have been a great name.
Yes this is the identical pattern we strive for at SQLAlchemy.
However github has no option to close issues to contributors only.
These folks do what we do, they have an issue template called "do not use this". big whoop. People blow through those all day so we're clicking on "convert to discussion" all day.
Github please add this feature!
Some of it may be unintentional. I've created issues directly through the `gh` CLI before, and issue templates don't show up there at all. If I haven't actually cloned the repo (or, more frequently, if I have a sparse checkout/deleted the files to save space), I have no way of knowing that there's a template and I'll just `gh issue -R some/thing create`.
I finally moved on to the official GitHub app on mobile, but before that I used fasthub and other clients that had no idea about issue templates.
GitHub really needs to add permissions to issues, so that users can't create issues without the template; any kind of failure in creation is a sign that you're doing something wrong. The ability to add tags to issues when creating via CLI would also be helpful.
We (Renovate) have an issue template (for maintainers/Triage-rights only) which has a label on it
Then GitHub Actions runs on new Issues and any that have that label get auto-closed
The idea is that folks with Triage+ can remove that label when creating an Issue, but not external contributors - might be worth giving that a go?
my fear is people are going to post issue reports, sometimes good ones that we need to act upon, they get autoclosed, and the submitter either never bothers to re-post or they are so annoyed that they don't re-post.
it would be way better if there was only one way for them to get their content in, in the first place
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The motivation for that is very convincing, yet a quick glance at Issues tab makes me understand it without any additional explanation.
It looks great. As mentally easy to process as Jira tasks. Or even better, cause it was written by a good "PM", which is not always a case commercially.
What I often do on ZeroFS [0] is to convert issues to discussions, it's a one click operation on github and helps reduce the noise for ill-defined issues.
[0] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS
So how do the maintainers and contributers know when a Discussion details a bug ready to be worked on? Seems like, as with issues, they'll still be sorting though them and looking for the most active ones?
Edit: after reading the contributors doc, it seems that feature requests are discussions which should help. Unreproducible bugs, too; although I would wager that a lot of users believe they can reproduce bugs but in fact can't consistently, or believe their feature request is a bug.
It seems this approach is better but still requires someone to sort through the discussions before they're moved to the cleaner issues pile.
One big pile with filters, or a chaotic pile and a clean pile. That seems to be the end result of this, unless I'm missing something.
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Tell him Victoria refer you
Just do the Apple / Google / MS model where anyone can freely open tickets, and then those bugs are never seen or addressed by any developers. Essentially use the bug tracker as a honeypot to keep the users happy
Works for large projects with active communities (Ghostty has both). The filter pays off when volume is high. Doesn't work for smaller projects where every report matters and you want to lower barriers. The brutal honesty ("80-90% of you are wrong") is refreshing but may alienate contributors. A middle ground would be issue templates with mandatory checklists, filters without adding an extra step.
Maybe "issue" should then be renamed into "TODOs". Because end users have "issues" with a product, it is up for someone with more knowledge to identify if the "issue" is PEBKAC, WONTFIX, FEATURE, or actually a TODO for the developers.
The term "discussion" does not have anything to do with this.
I understand these are all github choices of terms, and it should also be reframed properly by github.
Sure, issues for tasks and discussions for conversations.
And then there are developers who idly complain about normal participation on the work of issues and coordination of testing and feedback because it sends them a notification that they turned on. Unconstructive bitching drives users and collaborators away. They could solve their notification problem rather than impose a burden and emotional bullshit on everyone else.
This attitude is why the project has toxic maintainers from Germany to China: https://xcancel.com/QULuseslignux/status/1918296149724692968
This approach is very efficient and keeps the riff raff out. I love it. Even in our internal Jira tickets, they tend to spiral into long discussions in the comments, only to end up becoming entirely new features or even change what the "bug" originally was to something new. I might try to introduce a similar idea now that I've read this. Thanks
“It’s not a bug it’s a feature!”
Just the first thing that popped into my head reading the reasoning. I think it makes a lot of sense to do it like this. Especially for a product which is cross platform that emulates / replaces other known products and on top has extensive configuration options. I also switched over from kitty a couple of weeks back and really like it.
Hmm. I like it.
When I have a clear "Issue" which I've already researched, it's a bit of friction, but it doesn't seem like any more work to dump exactly the same text into a Discussion... and yea. Issues becoming a dumping ground is a real issue. This seems like a reasonable strategy / experiment.
I’m far from an AI booster but this sounds like a perfect job for an AI classifier to act as a gate keeper. If you can convince the AI that your bug report is sufficiently detailed to be actionable and issue gets created. Should reduce the low quality reports, crazy people and issue spam.
It's more or less what a customer of mine does with its support tickets. We receive the tickets, interact with customers, solve their problem and sometimes in the process we open one or more issues that enter into the backlog. Issues originated by a ticket usually have a high priority.
Last week a friend posted an issue to ghostty's github, and it got closed very fast - so he read this "Why users cannot create Issues directly", copied the post and pasted as discussion. Not much difference from my perspective.
This makes sense.
Personally, I use GH Issues for my own work, but there’s very few issues, so it’s not a burden. I’m a non-fan of JIRA.
I have seen GH Issues turn into Reddit-like flamefests (every now and then, someone posts a particularly entertaining one, here). Not my idea of productive work.
@jdx has gone one step further with mise. The issues has been completely disabled. I presume he tracks real issues in another repo. It'd be nice if github could provide first class support for such a workflow.
I briefly tried to contribute to a popular AI project (a ChatGPT-like web-based interface) where I found some bugs and reported them as issues, with steps to reproduce. The maintainer closed them and moved them to discussions, which is what he did to any issue he didn't like or personally didn't believe mattered, I guess. Items in Discussions didn't get any attention, nor were follow-ups looked at. One of the issues even involved the total loss of user data on upgrade.
So this makes me think the developer here just doesn't like the idea of issues being reported on his project.
Having maintained a relatively popular open source project for a bunch of years, I love this idea. Totally stealing this for future projects.
If only you could have project boards with their different views be the top level tabs instead of just open issues and pull requests...
Why not use labels for this? Discussions seem to be a bad use case for bug reports, but I can understand using it for feature request
> 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves.
Who does this project actually serve? The "users", or someone else?
If I'm getting overwhelmed with hundreds of issues per week about some confusion around installation or use, I think those issues are completely justified. Something should probably be fixed if the happy path is this obscure. Pushing this reality into another bucket is not the solution for me.
As an OSS maintainer myself, while the amount of tickets about a specific topic _might_ be loosely related to the quality of the docs/installation/etc, this hasn't been true in my observations.
It's one of those explanations that sound very plausible on paper, but if you see real world issues it just doesn't happen, users will ask questions that are clearly explained in the first paragraph of the readme, en masse.
> clearly explained in the first paragraph of the readme
Yeah but people justifiably don't exhaustively read documentation. If people are getting confused because they didn't read some bit of documentation - even the first paragraph of the readme - then you shouldn't just dismiss them as stupid and bask in your superior documentation-reading abilities. You should think about how to resolve that confusion in a way that they would actually see it.
It's hard to explain how to do that without a concrete example, but it usually is possible. It's also usually more work than just replying RTFM, but you should at least be aware that you are choosing not to bother.
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Let's not forget there are actual people behind open source projects. I think it is extremely rude to say those people should SERVE the users of their open source projects for free. The project "serve" the needs of the maintainers. If you as a user don't like something, that is entirely YOUR problem. Feel free to fork it and fix the bugs you think are worthy fixing.
It serves the open source maintainers, who enjoy working on it.
Did you also read the part about using Discussions instead? It’s not that users are not allowed to voice feedback, make request, or ask questions. They should just do so in a different place.
> Any Discussion which clearly identifies a problem in Ghostty and can be confirmed or reproduced will be converted to an Issue by a maintainer
I wonder if just tagging and filtering automatically via a GitHub setting which currently doesn’t exist could serve the same purpose
How is the technical block done? Just a bot closing issues or is there some github setting for this?
Great approach. It can also prevent negative energy leak to passionate maintainers.
To me this just shows that the Github issue concept is significantly flowed.
Open source is weird. It’s like everyone on the entire planet is your coworker and you have no real say in their hiring, on boarding, or firing.
I can see why there is trepidation and guard rails around giving them the key to your office planner.
I don’t see how this demonstrates that at all. Issues as a concept seems sound. There is a huge variety of social structures that are built around issues which might make it a good or bad fit
I have never worked on projects that give non members write access to our bug tracker.
This includes both our open source project not giving the public access. And our entirely closed source internal projects not giving other developers within the company write access.
I didn’t know GitHub had discussions. This is great
This is ironically described in an open issue...
Ironic, yet practical. This is so that the issue can be 'pinned' to the top of the Issues page, making it more visible:
https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues
Shouldn't this be a discussion?
This is much better than the stale-bot bs irreversibly closing perfectly valid issues just because the reporter have not replied for couple weeks.
The stale-bots are even worse than that. The reporter may have responded quickly, and the bug may be acknowledged as real. But if there's simply no activity in the issue for the month following, it will be closed.
this project sure has a ton of open bugs
This is a good AI application - something which accepts user problem reports and tries to group them together. Maybe even reproducing the bug in a sandbox if the description is good enough. Engaging with the complainant to get more info.
This could be useful if not used for enshittification, where you have to get past the chatbot to reach anybody useful.
A couple of big projects in the python space use this approach. Pisses me off as a power user. I find what are clearly bugs all the time, and am forced through a funnel that places the burden on me. Stinks of arrogance to think your project is that rock solid you should add friction for reporting bugs. Especially in “forever v0” projects.
But, I am super lazy.
Arrogance? Those people are spending their time and effort on an open source project, without asking a penny in return. I think they are entitled to have restrictions on how bugs should be reported.
Maybe you should become part of the project if you find bugs regularly ;-)
How is opening a discussion more friction than opening an issue?
In the python projects in question, unlike with the Ghostty project, there isn't an "issue triage" discussion category that maintainers look at. They have just discussions, and everything is treated as such. So when you raise an issue in discussions, it either goes to the void or people come in looking for a discussion of alternative approaches to do what you're trying to do that don't hit the bug, rather than treating the bug as a bug.
At a high level - the audience of discussions is the community at large, the audience of issues is the maintainers.
What Ghostty is doing with a dedicated category for issue triage should work just fine, despite it being an additional hop.
Your feedback is very important to us. Please fill out this long ass form and provide mountains of telemetry as barriers to participation.
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There's zero entitlement expressed by the parent, he's just trying to help the project, but is encountering unnecessary friction.
It's not that he has some inner urge to contribute in some way, he just encountered a bug while using the software and wants to report it. The alternative isn't coding — it's no contribution at all.
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> No one is forcing you to use any of these projects
Unless you only ever work on projects that you have full absolute control over (unlikely if you have a job) then yes they absolutely are.
This is like being forced to pay 50 bucks to your apartment because someone else broke the door. Then when you complain about it people tell you you’re entitled!
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> to know "what is clearly a bug" 100% of the time in projects you don't own
Owning a project is counter-productive for QA. If it’s your project, you know where to click and where to not click.
OTOH, you don’t need to know anything about a project to conclude that a crash with access violation, or hang with 100% CPU usage, are clearly bugs.
>90% of the time it's usually pretty clear if something is a bug, especially if there's log files full of errors.
Fwiw, you might have misinterpreted the idiomatic expression "all the time" as meaning "100% of the time". It just means "often" or "commonly". The parent is just saying they often find bugs, they know they're bugs through experience.
Of course anyone can make a mistake. Maybe you prefer the 'discussions' route because it's only seemingly then possible for a projects own devs to make a mistake in creating an issue.
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To be clear, I am not telling Mitchell how to run his project. I am providing info on how a change like this can be perceived from the other side. Do with the information what you will.
[dead]
(2014)
It's actually (2024)