Comment by goku12
11 hours ago
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.