GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
212 comments
·January 16, 2025sensanaty
deckar01
Doesn’t unwatching a repo limit notifications to mentions and participated threads?
ricardobeat
Codeowners are added as a reviewer to every PR that touches a file under their (team) ownership. In a large codebase it can easily happen that a large % of PRs changes something you're a codeowner for.
null
adsteel_
Have you been able to try trailer.app?
christophilus
It’s fine for small projects. I clear mine daily, and it’s the sole place I do any communication management.
hamandcheese
A GitHub feature I think would be really handy is suggesting duplicate issues when writing up a new issues. Many projects ask that you search for already reported tickets, but GitHub's current search isn't great if you aren't sure what you are looking for.
alexpovel
Agree!
For fun, I had put together a GitHub bot for this purpose a while ago. It indexes all existing issues in a repo, creates embeddings and stores them in a vector DB. When a new issue is created, the bot comments with the 3 most similar, existing issues, from vector similarity.
In theory, that empowers users to close their own issues without maintainer intervention, provided an existing & solved issue covers their use case. In practice, the project never made it past PoC.
The mechanism works okay, but I've found available (cheap) embedding models to not be powerful enough. For GitHub, technology-wise, it should be easy to implement though.
Sytten
We made a similar thing too for our community discord where you can add an Emoji on a message and it will look for similar issues with a simple RAG. That saves us so much time when a user asks if a feature is planned or not. We also ask them to go upvote the issue or create one in the response.
Not open source right now but if people are interested I could clean up the code.
smarx007
Microsoft seems to use a similar bot themselves, not sure how it is called or whether it is OSS: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/issues/4765#issuecom...
alexpovel
Oh yeah, that looks super similar. I remember the similarity score being tricky to get useful signal out of, for the underlying model I had used back then. Similar and dissimilar issues all hovered around the 0.80 mark. But surely not hard to improve on, with larger models and possibly higher-dimension vectors.
mort96
If only Microsoft was interested in finding actual useful use-cases for their machine learning tech instead of constantly selling everyone on their chat bot...
TeMPOraL
If we're talking issues (i.e. reports from external parties, like OSS users, and not internally defined tasks), then care is needed to avoid it working out like the Stack Overflow experience. What is it, you ask?
[Closed; Locked: not constructive; Duplicate of: #1701, #74656]
Users will fight such things for a simple reason: every larger OSS project has tons of open[0] issues that look like duplicates, and perhaps even are duplicates, but no one can tell because they're all ~forever old and unresolved, so new people keep adding them again to bring attention to them.
Perhaps Github should start sorting issues by "Last updated" instead of the issue number - then some of the duplicate reports would just turn into "+1"s and "bump!"s on the existing issues.
--
[0] - Or closed by stale bot, which is effectively still open, but with an insult on top.
withinboredom
I refuse to work with projects with a stale bot. As if ignoring an issue will just magically resolve it. I also refuse to use products with a stale bot once I discover it is used; they are usually bug ridden due to uncovered issues being ignored.
hnlmorg
Completely agree with this suggestion.
Ive often wondered why GitHub hasn’t introduced this feature because it feels like a really obvious thing to introduce and something that would add an immense amount of value to a lot of projects.
null
sethops1
Cynical answer: because having users writeup duplicate issues and then having maintainers close them is more engagement than warding off unnecessary toil. Gotta keep those metrics going up and to the right.
rafram
GitHub doesn’t have ads and makes its money off of enterprise subscriptions (and Copilot), so I don’t think “engagement” is a very important metric for them.
that_guy_iain
I suspect it's more to do with issue management isn't their core product so doesn't get the same attention an issue management system would give it.
null
grajaganDev
Meta and Google have this in their internal systems.
ruraljuror
Good suggestion! Sounds similar to what stack overflow does when asking a question.
rukshn
I was also having some frustration in navigating GitHub issues.
So I wrote a simple app for fun to navigate and search GitHub issues like emails and even reply
Screen recoding https://x.com/justruky/status/1878507719520387347
anon7000
It definitely had something like this at least in beta within the last couple years, or maybe just based on the title.
But you’re completely right, GH search is truly bad
Sytten
Ideally there should even be an API for it so we can use it in other systems like slack/discord bots when people suggest improvements.
eviks
> This means there are no new UI patterns to slow you down,
Sure there are, it's a common UI design mistake - you can't do advanced without breaking the basics: previously you could filter your issues with a drop-down filter in 2 clicks. The PR tab still has this (inconsistency) while the new issue requires a worse and longer path that uses a typed field, bringing up you phone keyboard as a downside
maeil
Longer paths, especially ones like these that require keyboard input, are especially painful from an accessibility perspective, where for most cases such typed fields make things take exponentially longer than if it can be achieved by just clicks/tabs/arrows.
antics
I think of GitHub as a sad story. There are probably going to be at least 3 public companies that should have "just" been GitHub features: GitLab (GitHub Enterprise), Sourcegraph (search), and Linear (GitHub Issues). There are dozens of upstarts "unbundling" features of GitHub that are genuinely useful, but which are under-loved and under-invested in, and surely some of those will become successful too. It feels like GitHub continuously invents the future, and then waits for someone else to make it truly great.
It is so painful to watch because I love GitHub so much. I graduated college in 2013, which means I started programming right when they got started. I read their dev blog every single day, eagerly waiting for new features (which were released every couple days). I watched their team page grow, I looked carefully at what they did to deserve a spot at such a cool company. I scoured the projects they contributed back to for hints about what good code looked like (my favorite was Vicent Martí's contributions to libgit2). I eagerly taught my friends how to use git because university taught subversion. I wrote my own Rails tutorials as a way to learn the magic.
But it's been years now, and it's not an easy love. It's work! It's so painful to watch it get continuously lapped by upstarts. I always just thought the core offerings (Pull Requests and Issues) would get better eventually. And now, 14 years later, they finally are. But very slowly. I really want to believe, but after 16 years, it is starting to sink in that GitHub might just be a place to store files.
The magic is still in there. I think there are lots of people like me, who want to believe. But it will take real agency to do it, and that's really hard to muster at this stage in a company's life.
btown
I like GitHub precisely because it didn't try to capture the entire market of issue trackers and code search too aggressively.
If GitHub sub-issues had existed even in an inferior form back in 2019, developer-targeted trackers like Linear and Shortcut would have had a hard time existing, and all of their ideas (some of which have advised the UX of today's GitHub sub-issues release!) would have been lost to time.
Now, perhaps this was not value-maximizing to Microsoft, or value-maximizing to companies who now need an extra license for Linear - but I would argue that for actual developer experience, GitHub fostering a spirit of innovation through its own stagnation has created a vibrant ecosystem better than anything any company could do themselves.
antics
Yes this is one of the reasons this discussion is so tricky. I just believe that if I maintain a popular project on GitHub I should not be automatically consigned to worst-in-class experiences for Issues and code review. I understand this is mildly controversial but I have had maintainer status on a few top 0.01% GitHub repositories and I have seen tools that do not suck, and so my opinion is that a better world is possible.
Again, I say all of this entirely with love. I love GitHub. I have used GitHub since I started programming. I want them to win.
habosa
> automatically consigned to worst-in-class experiences
You said it perfectly. This is why there are a lot of people willing to create better experiences on top of GitHub’s API.
I created CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com) to improve GitHub’s code review and there’s also Graphite, CodePeer, Reviewable, and others doing a great job.
motorest
> There are probably going to be at least 3 public companies that should have "just" been GitHub features: GitLab (GitHub Enterprise), Sourcegraph (search), and Linear (GitHub Issues).
I don't agree, and I cannot understand what train of thought would lead to conclude that each individual feature that's a crucial part of any developer's workflow should be broken down to external companies without any good reason at all.
Any developer's workflow consists of a) ticketing, b) revision control, c) auditing code and change history, d) CICD. Obviously a) b) and c) are tightly coupled and you cannot have one without the other, whereas d) invariably leads to a) b) and c) in any incident response scenario. There is no argument that justifies any alternative to a unified developer experience.
antics
Sorry if this was not clear, but I am not making a normative statement that each feature should be broken out into its own tool. I'm saying that the revenue ramp on each these products is, empirically, good enough to be on track to IPO. So GitHub is apparently doing a bad enough job in each of those areas that three separate companies were able to break a feature out into a dedicated product, sell it on its own, and ramp revenue fast enough to support a venture class business. Absolutely wild stuff.
cratermoon
I feel like ticketing is something that has been pasted on for corporate reasons. Keeping track of the work to be done doesn't require a ticketing system, anyone remember using Story Cards? A whiteboard?
TeMPOraL
Well, if they wanted to implement keeping track of work to be done, they'd have long ago implemented subissues, sub-subissues, and sub^n-issues, because obviously work does not break down into a list, or a one-level-deep tree - the natural data structure for breaking down work is a directed graph (and if you really must do an 80/20 on it, then a tree).
Sadly, to this day, out of popular software packages used in software companies, only Microsoft Project and maybe Jira get this right. Unfortunately, they have plethora of unrelated issues that are big enough that they drive the industry towards silliness of managing work in tools like Trello or Github/Gitlab issues.
EDIT: I sometimes wonder how much of how Agile implementations look is a consequence of simplistic tooling. When your team's work planner is fundamentally unable to represent the basic idea that tasks can depend on other tasks, you can't really plan ahead much further than a sprint. So is the Agile cadence really about avoiding the Folly of the Waterfall, or is it just shitty tooling that makes it exponentially hard to think ahead for more than two weeks? Did we invent "epics" because we can't link together multiple tasks on a Kanban board?
And then, how many companies SCRUM the living hell out of their developers, while PMs secretly plan the whole thing ahead in MS Project to keep the project on track towards some goal, and then pray no one on the dev team spots a Gantt chart open on their screen?
(Personally, I worked under one once; they begrudgingly admitted to managing everything in MS Project once I started asking if I can get a license, because even Emacs Org Mode sucks at the job if the job is to break down month's worth of work on entire deliverable.)
EDIT2:
> Keeping track of the work to be done doesn't require a ticketing system, anyone remember using Story Cards? A whiteboard?
Anyone remembers a project plan? Work breakdown structure? I know PERT looks to people like a Borg Cube, but then the status quo in software dev looks like Pakled technology. "We are devs. We scrum. Trello make us go!"
ImPostingOnHN
I hate bureaucracy and will actively question the necessity of any imposition of bureaucracy, and resist its imposition if it doesn't seem justified.
Nonetheless, there is use to more than just sticky notes. It tends to come with scale, and trying to coordinate and align teams of teams of teams of teams, etc.
Additionally, sticky notes are impractical for remote teams (would there be some always-on webcam pointed at them?)
habosa
Don’t forget code review. I created CodeApprove, but there are so many other good alternatives that could have been GitHub features (Graphite, CodePeer, Reviewable, etc).
SOLAR_FIELDS
FWIW, this specific feature - what they are now calling sub-issues - is actually better described as a framework for modeling proper parent-child relationships in their system, which is something quite hard to get right, mainly because it has to work somehow with the existing issues feature set. People building this feature from scratch (e.g. Linear) have it trivial to solve, because they didn't have any backwards compatibility issue to worry about. This is, of course, absolutely Github's fault for not designing it to accomodate such a thing easily in the first place, but the people who built this feature are probably not the same people who made that original decision.
They've been working on some version of this feature for several years now in various iterations. I believe this is either their third or fourth attempt to get it right - I was trialing a beta of some previous iteration of it a few years ago and it was incomplete/not fully well thought out which must be why they dropped it. I'd trust the feature here at least to be decent now, because of how many attempts they've had at it.
But yeah if I was a company like Zenhub I would be probably a bit worried at this announcement since it is almost inevitable that this specific feature is going to be enough for people to no longer need third party management of issues. I know in a previous company I worked for that specific feature (proper parent-child relationships) was the reason they used Zenhub, and same for my current company using Linear.
TeMPOraL
> FWIW, this specific feature - what they are now calling sub-issues - is actually better described as a framework for modeling proper parent-child relationships in their system, which is something quite hard to get right
That's a wrong framework to use. Parent/child relationship is a special case of dependencies between tasks, which can be more generally modeled as start/finish relationships, i.e. one of: Start-to-Start, Start-to-Finish, Finish-to-Start and Finish-to-Finish; parent-child relationship is Finish-to-Finish here. This distinction starts to matter if you want to plan out more work items than you can quickly eyeball on a Kanban board, and it's all well-trodden ground with nearly century worth of prior art, to which our entire industry is entirely oblivious.
Useful search terms: PERT, Gantt charts, critical path, PMBOK.
Popular software occasionally spotted in use in our industry (usually by PMs, in secret) that supports it: MS Project, maybe Jira, ... is there anything else?
ec109685
Once you have sizing, the ability to make an issue dependent, estimated start / end, don’t you have everything needed to generate a PERT / Gantt chart?
antics
Sorry, the goal here is not to trivialize GitHub, or suggest they suck at engineering, or even to say this is easy. I am just saying my own perspective, which is that I wish the core properties (pull requests, issues) had improved a long time ago. I have been a maintainer of a top 0.01% project, and I have seen it get in the way where other tools would have been tolerable. It hasn't always been easy to be a fan.
whalesalad
GitHub is a hugely successful company. They make a shit load of money. Your idea of success is not in congruence with actual success.
antics
Ok, let's try from another angle. Close your eyes and picture the ideal, best, most successful product in this space, for whatever definitions those words mean to you.
Everyone is different, but I think most people would not picture a source control product where search, issues, and on-prem are each so terrible, the default solution for that feature is to use a completely different product from a totally different company, which solves that specific issue (Sourcegraph, Linear, GitLab, respectively).
eslaught
> I started programming right when they got started.
Then let me tell you about SourceForge. SourceForge, around the time that GitHub started, had a lot of these features (or at least, the ones that were standard practice at the time). It was the de facto home of open source software development at the time, but it was also a megalith that tried to do everything.
GitHub was a breath of fresh air precisely because it had just the right balance of minimalism and features. There were plenty of truly minimalist hosts out there, so we didn't need any more of those. But we also had lots of bloated and slow code hosts. And it deserves to be stressed that the bloated ones were just as unusable as the minimalist ones, even while being (again, for the time) as feature-complete as they come.
Bloated products can't pivot. New features often don't integrate well with existing ones, and they take a long time to develop. We're seeing this with GitHub too, as feature velocity has dropped. But the difference is that GitHub's feature set, particularly their core initial feature set, was exceptionally well designed. They've lost a bit of this edge over time, but overall I think they've done a well enough job of balancing the thoughtfulness of their build-out with doing things at a reasonable speed.
I just want to emphasize this point because I think it gets lost, especially if you're not familiar with what the competition of the time looked like. GitHub absolutely would not have made it to where it is today if they had rushed to add features. For a comparison of what it looks like to build features first and put design on the back burner, see GitLab. There's a reason why I still find their product difficult to navigate despite it being one of the main tools I use in my day-to-day work. And I fear that if anything, GitHub is succumbing to the lure of feature count and becoming its own bloated monolith over time, even with their slow pace.
Calzifer
Great, a few more decades and it might become a usable bugtracker.
What's next on the list? Maybe priority/severity or status/resolution?
I helped on a quite large open source project for some time and loved working with Bugzilla. The announced switch to Github for that project was one reason I lost interest. I even prefer to work with a well administrated(!) Jira over Github issues.
IshKebab
> well administrated Jira
Based on my experience that doesn't exist.
Hell even if it did, Jira is sooooo unbelievably slow I would still take literally anything else. Maybe even Savannah.
A colleague joked that we need a "waiting for Jira" Jira task.
marginalia_nu
I think 99% of the problems with Jira stem from trying to use it for too many things at the same time.
If it's used for tracking issues, it's great.
If a team just uses it for keeping track of its ongoing work, it ok.
If the team also uses it to plan work, it works less well.
If management also uses it to keep track of what the team is doing, it works even less well, because now the team needs to put on a show for management with the tool it needs to track and plan its work. Now issues need to be phrased in a way so that they aren't causing outsiders to worry. Maybe don't say "problem" or "bug" so often. Use an euphemism. Can't we word it in a less concerning way?
If upper management has a dashboard of all departments' boards, you get nested Potemkin villages where the jira tasks are performative for both middle management, who in turn try to dress things up even more for upper management. At this point, the team (which still needs to track its issues and ongoing work) likely has a secret second issue tracker via post-it notes on a door somewhere.
TeMPOraL
> At this point, the team (which still needs to track its issues and ongoing work) likely has a secret second issue tracker via post-it notes on a door somewhere.
This. In my case, it was the whiteboard. It was at a place I worked ~decade ago, where everyone was using Jira for the official work management. That included management, but also included everyone in the electronics production and assembly branch of the company, so it was funny to compare our meticulously described sprint items with co-workers burning through dozens of entries a day, named by just long incrementing numbers.
rplnt
I believe Apple silicon has Jira coprocessor. It really became usable on M1 and beyond. Even the horrid UX got somehow better in the last few years (like not having 3+ different text inputs, each with different formatting behavior). My guess is since the hardware caught up with them they can now finally use it and iterate.
jonpurdy
You jest, but I tested this and it turns out that it was JavaScript, not slow networking, that made Jira so slow for me. (I was trying to figure out how to locally cache assets to speed it up.)
The M-series single-core speeds were so much faster than Intel at the time that it was noticeably faster.
aklemm
"Apple silicon has Jira coprocessor" time to retire to the country and raise chickens.
hadrien01
A well administered JIRA can be really fast. There's a reason Atlassian themselves don't use JIRA Cloud: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse
IshKebab
Huh that is much faster than Jira Cloud. How come though? Do they just hate their customers or something?
originalvichy
My guess is that self-hosted versions have an infinitely simpler user experience when it comes to accounts and visibility. Jira Cloud is definitely angled towards always being behind some sort of an account system, which used a real, costly backend, but the self-hosted one can get by with the local hosted IdP or an LDAP server.
dotancohen
Take a look at Redmine. It's a self-hosted Ruby project manager and I love it, especially for issue dependencies.
IshKebab
Nobody who uses Jira is really in a position to pick anything else.
lukeforehand
Even years ago Jira was too complicated, to the point that we joked about replacing it with a physical notebook.
badgersnake
Indeed, see https://ifuckinghatejira.com/
paulg2222
[dead]
StableAlkyne
> Maybe priority/severity or status/resolution?
That's already possible with the tag system. At least, that's the most common use I see for repos that decide to use tags.
How do you envision this differing?
akoboldfrying
Are you thinking of labels?
I only know GitHub "tags" to be the raw git branch-that-never-moves kind.
ffsm8
Totally off topic, but Tags can be moved too. ;) It's mostly a convention that we use annotated tags (a tag that also creates a commit) and don't move them
smarx007
Sorting by priority?
chrisandchris
Transitioned from Jira to Gitlab. Jira has workflows/resolution states. Gitlab only has tags.
It's a different mindset and a different way to work. I'm not sure I'm happy with only-tags because it puts the work to the end-user (i regularly need to add tags because someone forgot to add it - could not happen with workflows and proper transitions).
rbetts
Using Github issues as a manager of multiple teams using multiple repos in GitHub has so many gaps, I often wonder if I'm just doing it wrong. The multi-repo issues feature a few years back was a huge step forward but also is very incomplete, still. Multi-repo labels and milestones, for example, are an obvious missing feature.
lmeyerov
Exactly this, they are so close!
sangeeth96
I really feel like GH needs to spin out Projects into a more dedicated, funded team while still maintaining a close sync in order for it to become more viable/interesting. Besides allowing it to grow faster and better, that should also allow for non-dev seat pricing.
TeMPOraL
IDK, but maybe, for the sake of people working in projects that are managed using Github/Gitlab issues, they'll spin off a separate "Tasks" features and allow to set dependencies on them.
FridgeSeal
Jira is so abominably slow, that it should be laughed/shamed out of the room in any discussion of useful software.
treyd
Yeah I have no confidences in GH to become viable for issue management for large commercial projects.
It works fine if you're a group of highly competent and aligned FOSS developers that need it more as a communication tool than a work management tool. But if you get to breaking work down to the level of a few story points it becomes completely unmanageable. The table view turns into a slog if you have more than like 70 tickets.
JensRantil
Jens's law: Every ticketing system will eventually become Jira.
This is also what is happening with GH issues.
dmd
It's worse than that. Every ticketing system will eventually become ServiceNow.
Compared to SN, Jira is a breath of fresh air.
sangeeth96
I'm curious if there are folks here who work at for-profit orgs who use GitHub projects as their sole issue tracker for the entire org. How do you do it and what are the common pain points? Do you couple it with other issue trackers/project management tools like Jira? If so—why?
I still feel GH Projects is solely aimed at OSS or dev-centric or dev-only orgs and doesn't cater to teams with non-devs, which is how I think most orgs function. I'm not sure if it'll ever try to be something more than that but I really wish it did.
acjohnson55
We did at my previous employer (https://www.ourbranch.com/) in our data org. I can't totally remember, I'm pretty sure the engineering org did, too. It definitely is lacking in some of the advanced features you get with a Jira, but it was fine. I was surprised by how powerful GitHub Projects is. We also built out extra reporting for it in our data warehouse, using Fivetran for ELT.
sangeeth96
Oh cool! I have some questions:
1. Does the data org work in isolation from other orgs? I'm guessing not.
2. Does the data org consist of non-engineers? If yes, are they also onboarded into GitHub with their own GH accounts?
3. If (1) is no, what tool is used to track cross-org work? Does the company also use Jira or some other tool and is GH projects integrated with them or something? I'm really curious about this workflow if it is relevant to how you folks work.
acjohnson55
1. No -- the project boards and issue tracker were visible to the whole company, which was helpful for being able to show people what we were doing and where their requests were scheduled. Our points of contact within departments we supported worked particularly closely with my team to co-manage the projects.
2. Most of the ICs didn't have an engineering background, and came from a more traditional data analyst background. When I arrived, the only thing actually version controlled in Git was LookML that wasn't actually used. Many learned Git and GitHub for the first time there.
yakshaving_jgt
We ditched Jira to go all-in on GH. It's nice having the project management in the same place as where the actual work happens. It's not perfect, but it's better than GH + Jira.
Probably the benefit I'm most happy with are that people are writing more, and in greater detail. I don't know why that is. For some reason, the GH experience just encourages writing, whereas the Jira experience seems hostile to it.
sangeeth96
Interesting. Are you an all-dev org or did you also onboard non-devs into GH Projects?
> the GH experience just encourages writing, whereas the Jira experience seems hostile to it.
Huh, that's interesting to hear. I didn't personally find it harder to add detailed descriptions in Jira back when I used it couple of years back. Wonder if there's anything specific about the experience you can describe that makes you feel GH projects is more friendly for writing.
yakshaving_jgt
Roughly half the company are programmers, so we have non-devs working with GH Projects and collaborating on issues.
Colleagues who aren't developers have become more engaged in the process of writing bug reports or giving feedback on product development (or at least, the parts of it that concern them). Some of the non-programmers have admitted that they are surprised by how much they enjoy using GitHub.
landsman
Nice job!
saxonww
We were interested in Issues and Projects, but the number of people at an organization who need access to those but not to code or CI is pretty large. GitHub does not have a different license option for BA/CX/PM types. We ended up going with Jira for tasking, which was substantially cheaper.
I was sad about this because issues/projects had all the stuff I personally cared about, and there was no need to work to set up integrations. I think there was some anxiety by the PMO that it wasn't mature enough for what they wanted, but I don't remember any specifics. Probably something about reporting.
sangeeth96
That's how I feel as feel. It's costly given the things non-devs types won't need and it's not fleshed out enough to attract those types of folks to make the switch. GitHub is probably missing the boat tbh. Even the marketing page (https://github.com/features/issues) is targeted at developers.
madeofpalk
We do at Grafana - it's mostly all public so you can go look at the mess of trying to run jira boards for however many teams out of one repo https://github.com/orgs/grafana/projects. It's a mixed bag, but Github's been building out Issues and Projects a lot in the last few years that's really improved things.
drcongo
We do. We're an agency so there's probably 60 odd repos on GitHub each with a project attached, a lot of non-tech people (even clients) using the issues and boards. Nobody has complained, though every now and then I've looked around for something else, but for me the number one priority is that the code and issues are in perfect sync with each other - much harder with a 3rd party tracker.
jjayj
It would be a tough sell for my org to triple our license spend on GHEC just so we can teach a bunch of folks new software.
sangeeth96
Absolutely. They definitely can't expect to sell this to teams/orgs with non-devs without introducing separate pricing for folks who just want to read/write to projects but maybe read-only for some aspects of a repo.
eclipticplane
A FOSS plugin to mimic Service Desk on top of Github issues would be great.
You'd miss the infinite complexity of Jira workflow configuration, but that might be a good thing.
jt_b
Not FOSS, but this is kind of what Zenhub was/is, right?
cyberax
> I'm curious if there are folks here who work at for-profit orgs who use GitHub projects as their sole issue tracker for the entire org.
Yes, I'm an advisor for such a company. They are using Github Projects/Issues for all their internal development.
Their customer support uses a different ticketing system, though. Mostly because they need to interact with external users.
portaouflop
We tried (dev-centric org) but the non-technical users weren’t able to use it well / didn’t like it - so now we don’t have issue tracking at all for non technical stuff -.-
sangeeth96
Oh my! That doesn't sound like a good place to be in. I hope y'all figure something out to get them onboard or migrate out.
portaouflop
We mostly use notion and google workspace for the non-technical stuff now and as far as I can tell both are pretty good.
Wicher
Great, but I would've been happier if I'd had some dead simple dependency tracking 10 years ago. Just enough to create metabug functionality with. Like Bugzilla, Trac, Mantis etc have sported for at least two deades. I've always wondered why Github didn't have such basic functionality. (No, just the ability to reference other issues is not enough; I want to get an email for the metabug when all blocking issues are resolved).
decide1000
I am not sure if I am going to like this feature. I miss the simplicity. Guess those times re over.
captn3m0
I'm remembering the Redmine slide from Zach Holman's talk, where he makes fun of the overly complicated Redmine issue creation screen, compared to what the GitHub screen looked like (back in 2011).
Slides 56 and 57 at https://speakerdeck.com/holman/how-github-uses-github-to-bui...
Gigachad
I can handle these 3 changes but if they take it any further it's going the way of jira..
globular-toast
That's not how it works. It is going the way of Jira. What you mean is if it keeps going that way it will be Jira.
Until we get to the point we can decide things are finished and move on to other problems, everything will turn into Jira eventually. It's like entropy. We have the power to stop it, but it wouldn't guarantee those sweet, sweet growth targets.
voidfunc
The problem is Microsoft has two products in this space but everyone hates Azure DevOps which is supposed to be a JIRA competitor and GitHub is where all the momentum is. They'd love to ditch having to maintain ADO and GitHub long term but that means crapifying GitHub so they can migrate their ADO customers. At the same time they're hoping to pull Atlassian customers that use JIRA and GitHub to ditch the latter and just entirely be on GitHub.
What well end up with is a service that sucks to use for all cases.
xpe
Lots of ideas above, rather speculative.
Overall, the claim above, as written, is a rather generalized prediction, not an inevitability.
Enterprise buying power and expectations create various pressures, sure. But there are other pressures and factors that need to be accounted for such as demands from other types of customers and the company’s expertise with what has worked well so far (simpler is better, compared to Jira).
Entropy is a law of physics, sure, but the ways and degrees to which it manifests in software is far from obvious or inevitable.
We live in a world of possible future scenarios, not of narrative-based certainties.
I predict GitHub Issues will remain considerably simpler than Jira for the next five years at least. As code analysis tools improve (traditional static analysis as well as LLM-based), I think we will see a lot of experimentation in this space.
renegade-otter
GitHub is free for most people, so they are only beholden to large organizations and their feature requests. This is how it seems now - a feature creep by committee. It's getting more and more bloated and unwieldy, sort of like what happened to AWS.
sneak
This is just Conway’s Law.
Microsoft is a juggernaut.
jonpurdy
It is less simple, but nowhere Jira-level, and yet still more useful (for my team and I).
We've been using GH Projects at my current org and program for two years. The one feature I wish it had was nested issues.
In Jira, you had Epic > Task > Sub-task and that's it. With GH, you can just have issue > issue > issue (insert "it's turtles/issues all the day down meme"). So it's more powerful, but can be ignored by folks who don't want to do this.
dacryn
same here.
I guess it's Microsoft slowly making it cater to their enterprise clients
foepys
Microsoft is getting ready to replace Azure DevOps with GitHub.
alternatex
This is fiction considering Microsoft is extensively using Azure DevOps internally and is still developing it. Moving projects away from it and to GitHub is impossible because they're incredibly far from having feature parity.
zo1
People have been saying this for half a decade, and fearmongering everyone into moving elsewhere (sadly my team fell for it).
Azure Devops is such an underrated tool, it's a shame that it's being ignored by Microsoft. Not only that, but they're enshittifying it by turning into Github. I kid you not, it actually went backwards in terms of features. E.g. Instead of nifty UIs that was implemented for their pipelines, we now instead have to write shitty yaml files with absolutely no validation and guidance. This is the same company that (re)wrote Word, Excel and Powerpoint in the browser! The mental whiplash from witnessing this is very jarring.
kkaatii
The sub-issue structure seems much better than Jira's approach where everything has to fit into a hierarchy. Then it becomes hard to align on the definition of a certain level in the hierarchy.
This create-a-subissue-when-needed way is more sensible.
WorldMaker
It's also not that different from what people have been using Task Lists for today: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/wor...
I think that's maybe my biggest question is what the interop looks like between Task Lists and Sub-Issues. Is there a "one-click upgrade" yet? What if I want to copy a list of Sub-Issues as Markdown Task List to copy into a Discussion or a Wiki somewhere?
trallnag
You can use a single type of issue in Jira and just rely on linking them together
IshKebab
Yeah we ended up doing this. You should basically never use Epics or Subtasks in Jira because they have weird unnecessary restrictions that don't apply to normal tasks, especially around putting them in sprints.
kkaatii
Wow i didn't know that.
isodev
In other words, GitHub introduces "endless discussions if we're going to use subtasks or sub-issues in our WoW"
weinzierl
I, for my part, would be happy if they could make basic search work for a start. Will the advanced search finally allow us to find the most basic things reliably?
edflsafoiewq
What doesn't work?
weinzierl
If you search code for a string you know is there it is completely git or miss if it is found. Always has been like that.
edflsafoiewq
I assumed you were talking about issue search, since that's what the thread is about.
idunnoman1222
Oh yeah, where on the Internet does this work reliably?please don’t say gitlab
zb3
Sorting code search results by date.
Day 50 trillion of begging Github for a functional notification system so I can stop receiving infinite numbers of emails from all the bots and similar things commenting on PRs.
Also being designated a codeowner in a large repo, the number of notifications I get daily from the number of PRs is fucking absurd, with no way of turning them off. Drives me up the wall daily. If a colleague doesn't straight up send me a PR in a DM, I'll basically never see it because I've given up on the notification screen a looooong time ago.