The trouble with bug tracking / project management software is that everybody wants Just One More Feature.
But if you implement them all, it will become an overcomplicated mess, somebody will replace it with a simpler version, and the cycle will repeat.
Would I like some of the features they've decided not to implement? Yes.
Would I hate the results if they implemented everything on this list? Also yes.
And making everything configurable so you can pick the exact subset you want is (a) an incredible amount of work to make the resulting combinatorial explosion of possible choices all work nicely (b) tends to inevitably lead to something like JIRA.
I do appreciate people being annoyed about specific features they'd really like getting removed from the roadmap, but so it goes.
This is why you don’t announce future changes until they’re essentially ready to go out the door. Apple used to understand this better than most. Until you build the feature, you’ll have people asking you constantly when it’ll be done. After you build it, you’ll have people complaining that it doesn’t work exactly like they imagined it in their head. If you end up not building it and say so, you’ll get attacked for it, even by people who never knew about the plans before the cancellation.
Keep quiet about internal plans only you can affect. Let features requests come to you, monitor interest in those, and reply if they’re interesting or not feasible, so you can discuss and figure out what would work best for your users. Engage but don’t commit unless you’re certain something will happen.
I’m surprised the conversation hasn’t devolved to a bigger mess yet (maybe it’s being well moderated). It’s a shame they’re having to preemptively lock issues, but I completely get it. It’s exhausting having to deal with abuse on public forums when you’re on the receiving end and always have to keep your conposure.
There was a time when the dream of open source was healthy and strong. GitHub was a big part of the movement. So it shouldn't be surprising that they did more of their planning in the open than a company like Apple.
There are tradeoffs with secrecy. Trust me when I tell you, secrecy comes at a cost. It limits the flow of ideas, even within your own organization.
I'm tempted to agree with you anyways, since I've been in the situation before where we wanted to change things we were making while we were making them. You don't want to give off the impression that you don't know what you're doing.
Honestly, this kinda goes back to agile vs. waterfall too. It's all about defining requirements and meeting them.
I think I agree with you for discrete product releases, but for ongoing SaaS and moreso PaaS, it's helpful for integrations to have some visibility on your roadmap. I'm might just write a hack workaround for some issue if I have a belief that in 2024 you'll solve X -- I've got bigger fish to fry. But if I know you've removed it from your roadmap and it was planned by me, I can put it on mine to resolve. Surprising me with features means more often than I care to admit I write something to solve a problem, use it for a few months, and then vendor comes out with a solution to it that's close enough and better supported so I toss out code -- with a roadmap I could have avoided overlapping efforts.
But I'm more on the operational side - so I care more than most about the integrations with lots of vendors, different PoV's may of course differ.
The only one that directly annoys me is not being able to have threaded comments at the PR level. https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/552 You can do it with "quoting", which is fine if there are two of you but turns into a mess if there's more than that.
They've said that they're watching the discussions for feedback, so I hope they listen and implement that one.
Happy that they are being transparent (rather than letting the issues rot), annoyed that they appear to be prioritising marginally useful AI stuff for basic UX.
Also commenting on random irrelevant changed line because you can't comment on unchanged ones (but they might need changes due to rest of the PR).
Github code review is horrible and I think it's actually worse than not having anything at all because now it's hard to convince people we should switch to something better. "Oh I don't want to learn another tool, github is good enough"
I agree, also the source code viewer (not sure what it's called) has regressed tremendously. A few years back it was simple, quite snappy and just worked. Now it has become slow and bloated and barely works for me on the desktop and the mobile version is full of rendering bugs rendering the whole thing rather useless. (Using firefox both on mobile and on the PC)
All they had to do, literally, was to do nothing but no, can't have that. MUST ADD BLOAT.
Ever since GitHub was bought by Microsoft things have got worse for me as an end user -- browser compatibility is worse and I run into bugs frequently when on not-chrome; their academic programme now requires an insanely invasive localisation check that instantly fails for me on Linux and their support couldn't advance the process as I hadn't submitted an application yet; and their tooling slowly pushes people away from FOSS and towards proprietary methods. I wish they'd figure out how to make it a hacker friendly place again.
I use Firefox on Windows (on multiple machines), and when somebody has an image embedded in an issue or comment in Github, and I click it to see the original sized image it will not load, and simply shows a blank page instead. It's been like this for two years or so.
(I think I've ever seen one minor bug: for any repo in the clone dropdown, the "SSH" tab was hidden for me a while ago. Unfortunately I don't remember if this was browser related.)
Ideally they'd've been cleaning it out more regularly and these feature requests would've been marked "not currently on the roadmap" and closed much sooner.
But I don't think I've ever seen a team do a perfect job of that, and I'm probably worse at it than they are.
Plenty of large projects need to go through and do a bit of a sweep of old issues every few years. If your projects have the discipline to never need that I congratulate you.
But "Don't sweat over any little issue, especially if they have gone multiple years without major complaints from a sizeable part of your user base" is.
If they were all truly outdated, then sure. But as the comments have pointed out, Github also closed at least half a dozen still-relevant issues like "Commenting on unchanged lines in a pull request" that would be significant UX improvements.
This is exactly why HN discourages editorialising titles. This one was clearly modified to spark outrage. People click on it with a predisposition to be mad instead of being given the chance to reflect first.
"At GitHub, transparency and clarity are at the heart of our relationship with the community."
When these kind of carefully crafted prety slogans has to be a prime statement before anything is told then my suspicious mind gets very alert. Probably even overcompensate. Do people take these kind of forefront self evaluations as facts or have suspicion when this has to be announced and highlighted, stated (instead of being obvious). I do not know why (of course I do!) but these kind of self admirative statements have the opposite effect on me. Even when they are true.
I mean, it was clearly phrased by the marketing team, but it's on a post where they actively close a lot of bugs and clarify they won't be doing them, instead of doing what most companies do and just ignoring them for years.
I am going to call it, Microsoft has not been particularly good stewards of GitHub.
They have over complicated so much of it to please corporate customers that it has really lost what made it great to begin with.
It used to make everything seem simple and manageable. Changes were slow, sure, but they felt like they were at least thought through. The docs used to be simple and easy to navigate. Everything is about 10x more complex now.
I wish they would put more effort in Github Issues (the project management product). They are so close to have something that just exactly what I need. But it seems like they haven't touched it in a couple of years. There are still many rough edges that has been there since the beta.
Whilst I'd still take it with a grain of salt, two have been. Mostly their code scanning AI stuff though (or pieces of them), which... Has had a lot of issues, compared to more traditional approaches.
+ Code scanning: AI-powered autofixes for CodeQL alerts integrated into VS Code
Could Github developer workflow metadata (e.g. issues) be exported/serialized into a git repo for decentralized replication and/or import into an alternative?
I have it running in one of my repos using a GitHub Action that's triggered when an issue is created or updated - it commits a JSON export of that issue back to the repo.
Then I can git clone the repo and get all of the issues data.
I disagree. Etymologically, "enshittification" is the ongoing transformation of something into shit. But here, GitHub is declining to make certain changes; it is expressly resisting transformation. At best you could argue it was already shit due to the lack of these specific enhancements that would deshittify it.
Doctorow, who first studied enshittification, identified three distinct phases of the process: "First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." I don't see how this applies to the specific set of declined enhancements.
But if you implement them all, it will become an overcomplicated mess, somebody will replace it with a simpler version, and the cycle will repeat.
Would I like some of the features they've decided not to implement? Yes.
Would I hate the results if they implemented everything on this list? Also yes.
And making everything configurable so you can pick the exact subset you want is (a) an incredible amount of work to make the resulting combinatorial explosion of possible choices all work nicely (b) tends to inevitably lead to something like JIRA.
I do appreciate people being annoyed about specific features they'd really like getting removed from the roadmap, but so it goes.
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