GitHub's Issue Tracker causes a stir in the FOSS community

Jan 18, 2016 23:13 GMT  ·  By

Over 1,000 developers have signed an open letter aimed at forcing GitHub to revamp its Issues Tracker feature. The open letter was started as a method for GitHub users to provide feedback on the site itself.

GitHub is almost every developer's favorite tool for managing source code repositories, be they open-source, closed-source, or paid-for projects.

While developers that set up GitHub repos can get feedback from their users via the Issues Tracker feature available in all accounts, GitHub itself does not have such a feature for software developers and regular users to provide input and feedback on the service itself.

Every time a user wants GitHub to change something, they could only pray really hard every night that GitHub would implement it the next day, week, month, year.

Annoyed with this incredibly outdated method of running a community site like GitHub, James Kelly, developer at CloudFlare, wrote an open letter and opened a Google Docs spreadsheet where developers that agree with his criticism of GitHub could sign.

Developers have complaints about GitHub's Issues Tracker

According to Mr. Kelly, GitHub's Issues Tracker lacks the customization features project managers often need. The default Issues Tracker is very rigid in its setup, is full of useless noise due to the current commenting system's configuration, and does not allow developers to set up a custom CONTRIBUTING.md file to show in issues and pull requests according to their liking.

At the time of writing this article, 1,103 GitHub users have signed this open letter. What made GitHub take notice was the presence of many high-profile developers that are maintaining some of the most popular open source projects around, such as Node.js, jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, Babel, Dojo Toolkit, Meteor, React Native, Angular.js, jsPDF, JSFiddle, Bootstrap, DotNetNuke, Magento, Joomla, Fedora, ownCloud, DokuWiki, WP eCommerce, Notepad++, ChakraCore (Microsoft Edge's open source core), and many other more.

To GitHub's credit, its Director of Community, Jono Bacon, has said the company will take a look at their requests/complaints (via Hacker News).

As pushback against this aggressive tactic to force GitHub into upgrading some of its features, the community also created a "Thank You GitHub!" open letter. Until now, the letter has been signed by 291 developers.