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.
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.
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.
There's all the usual "$APPLICATION is a memory hog" complaints, for one.
In the SWE world, dev servers are a luxury that you don't get in most companies, and most people use their laptops as workstations. Depending on your workflow, you might well have a bunch of VMs/containers running.
Even outside of SWE world, people have plenty of use for more than 8GiB of RAM. Large Photoshop documents with loads of layers, a DAW with a bazillion plugins and samples, anything involving 4k video are all workloads that would struggle running on such a small RAM allowance.
This depends on industry. Around here, working locally on laptop is a luxury, and most devs are required to treat their laptop like a thin client.
Of course, being developer laptops, they all come with 16 gigs of RAM. In contrast, the remote VMs where we do all of the actual work are limited to 4GiB unless we get manager and IT approval for more.
How much would it take up if there was less RAM available. A web browser with a bunch of tabs open but not active seems like the type of system that can increase RAM usage by caching, and decrease it by swapping (either logically at the application level, or letting the OS actually swap)
If I'm doing work than involves three different libraries, I'm not reading and committing to memory the whole documentation for each of those libraries. I might well have a few tabs with some of those libraries' source files too. I can easily end up with tens of tabs open as a form of breadcrumb trail for an issue I'm tracking down.
Then there's all the basic stuff — email and calendar are tabs in my browser, not standalone applications. Ditto the the ticket I'm working on.
I think the real issue is that browsers need to some lightweight "sleep" mechanism that sits somewhere between a live tab and just keeping the source in cache.
I wonder if a good public flogging would compel chrome and web devs to have 80 tabs take up far less than a gigabyte of memory like they should in a world where optimization wasn’t wholesale abandoned under the assumption that hardware improvements would compensate for their laziness and incompetence.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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
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.
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.
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.[...]"""
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.
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.
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.
There's all the usual "$APPLICATION is a memory hog" complaints, for one.
In the SWE world, dev servers are a luxury that you don't get in most companies, and most people use their laptops as workstations. Depending on your workflow, you might well have a bunch of VMs/containers running.
Even outside of SWE world, people have plenty of use for more than 8GiB of RAM. Large Photoshop documents with loads of layers, a DAW with a bazillion plugins and samples, anything involving 4k video are all workloads that would struggle running on such a small RAM allowance.
This depends on industry. Around here, working locally on laptop is a luxury, and most devs are required to treat their laptop like a thin client.
Of course, being developer laptops, they all come with 16 gigs of RAM. In contrast, the remote VMs where we do all of the actual work are limited to 4GiB unless we get manager and IT approval for more.
Browser + 2 vscode + 4 docker container + MS Teams + postman + MongoDB Compass
Sure it is bloated, but it is the stack we have for local development
Chrome on my work laptop sits around 20-30GB all day every day.
How much would it take up if there was less RAM available. A web browser with a bunch of tabs open but not active seems like the type of system that can increase RAM usage by caching, and decrease it by swapping (either logically at the application level, or letting the OS actually swap)
I wonder if having less RAM would compel you to read, commit to long term memory, and then close those 80 tabs you have open.
If I'm doing work than involves three different libraries, I'm not reading and committing to memory the whole documentation for each of those libraries. I might well have a few tabs with some of those libraries' source files too. I can easily end up with tens of tabs open as a form of breadcrumb trail for an issue I'm tracking down.
Then there's all the basic stuff — email and calendar are tabs in my browser, not standalone applications. Ditto the the ticket I'm working on.
I think the real issue is that browsers need to some lightweight "sleep" mechanism that sits somewhere between a live tab and just keeping the source in cache.
I wonder if a good public flogging would compel chrome and web devs to have 80 tabs take up far less than a gigabyte of memory like they should in a world where optimization wasn’t wholesale abandoned under the assumption that hardware improvements would compensate for their laziness and incompetence.
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.
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 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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 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)
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.
How about using issue types? https://docs.github.com/en/issues/tracking-your-work-with-is...
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.
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.
I wonder if just tagging and filtering automatically via a GitHub setting which currently doesn’t exist could serve the same purpose
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...