Perhaps if Github used their own issues system to gather feedback on Github itself, they'd more rapidly improve it. I'm sure they'd feel a lot of these pain points in a far sharper, more visceral way if they were subjected to them daily.

Open source ties in with my work. Every one of my private repos has open source dependencies hosted on github.

Privileging the priorities of my private repos over their public dependencies would be shortsighted.

I think that’s Github’s call, but I definitely don’t disagree with you and apologize that I came off that way. Open source projects exposed me to Github and greatly benefit the projects I work on in private repos. I really do want those projects to have an effective platform for growth and stability. I don’t want to water down their needs; I just wanted to offer some balance to the discussion.

My point was simply that this probably isn’t something that is as easy for Github to solve as it may appear on the surface. Any changes they make to the issues system can’t upset the low friction way it works for repos with a modest amount of contributors (and +1’s from clients are appreciated). I hope that positive changes come out of this letter.

If Github were to leave Open Source projects high and dry, they’d lose my business.

But you're the huge majority of people who give GitHub money. It makes sense not to prioritize the pain points of open-source projects when you lose money by hosting them.

We only chose GitHub because we wanted to host our open source repos there. If they don't prioritize the open-source projects then we have no reason to pick them over BitBucket or something else like that.

Much of that is due to the OP's requested features that are currently missing. But tbh, it is too late to get us to switch.

> Issues are often filed missing crucial information like reproduction steps or version tested. We’d like issues to gain custom fields, along with a mechanism (such as a mandatory issue template, perhaps powered by a newissue.md in root as a likely-simple solution) for ensuring they are filled out in every issue.

For instance, is something we basically implemented in our local version of GitLab but aren't sharing because our implementation pulls this from internal docs other people can't use. Our CSRs put issues into GitLab but they tend to forget steps while on the phone with a user.

We wouldn't have bothered if we had something like this when I was evaluating GitLab vs. GitHub.

I also have a public account that I use for contributing to public projects so it could also help to avoid duplicate accounts in search results.

All accounts should be searchable for username/real name with GitHub's search anyway.

Your private repo's and contributions are not made public, so there's no "risk" involved.

Huh? Github isn't opened sourced so how is a different fashion from anyone else using private repos?

Users can use those buttons to +1 or -1, and any comments that contain nothing but an emoji (like `:+1:`) are automatically converted to emoji awards, as we call them.

What I came up to work around this is:

- Create an org named <YOUR-USERNAME>-deprecated - Move the projects to the organization - Set the avatar of the organization to your avatar, with desaturated colors (purely cosmetic, optional)

https://github.com/coreh-deprecated

Another good example is harthur's "[UNMAINTAINED]" [1]

[1] https://github.com/harthur/brain

I search and then i see it in the title.

Better would be an Option in Github to set a project to unmaintained or deprecated, with an optional link to the new project (if some exist).

Github could then change the background color from white to an other color or add a border around the page, so that it is really obvious that this project es EOL.

    ATTENTION: Please find the canonical repository here: 

What this tells you is that enough people are not only using this repository, which was last updated in August 2014 with a change to the README directing people at the new source, but people are giving it stars this week such that it shows up as "trending" higher than the correct repository.

There has to be something wrong with the deprecation process if this happens. [0]https://github.com/trending?l=erlang

Aye. Some folks in the discussion linked to by krschultz complain that "People sometimes don't read the README and -thus- don't notice deprecation warnings.". To them I ask: "What makes you think that those sorts of people will notice anything less than an overlay that prevents them from interacting with the Github UI for that particular repo?".

Sure. But... like... git doesn't know anything about deprecated repos. AFAIK, that's not a feature of git's repo fetch machinery. Anything Github would do to address this would have to modify the contents of the repo, right?

> ...go get for example would need some sort of structured metadata [to do reasonable repo deprecation warnings]

I mean, the JavaScript development community has -collectively- decided on a huge bundle of ad-hoc standards. I bet that it would be trivial for the signatories of the open letter to decide on a tagging mechanism to use in their README files to indicate repo deprecation. Do you disagree?

More details here: https://golang.org/cmd/go/#hdr-Remote_import_paths

Fair enough. (I don't use go, so I'm unaware of pretty much all of its internals.) [0]

> ...coordination between go and github could implement something for deprecated repositories without changing anything in git.

A couple of things:

* This only fixes things for Golang. It doesn't fix it for the couple-thousand other tools that pull things from Github.

* I never suggested changing things in git. That would be freaking nuts. :) EDIT: Or did you mean "without changing anything in the git repo"? If you meant that, then I strike this bullet point and apologise for the noise. :)

* Frankly, having a well-known file in your Git repo that contains meaningful tags seems far more compatible than changing git, or altering the $BUILD_TOOL<->GitHub integration... for one thing, the convention could be trivially adopted by non-git users. :)

[0] Thanks for the documentation link, BTW! :D

The people who ask for more proprietary features (or should I say anti-features) in Github are encouraging lock-in inside of Github. Github ought to be a hub. I'd like to emphasize on the hub part as it should be one hub out of many. It should not be the center of the software universe any more than AT&T/IBM/Microsoft/Google/Facebook/Uber.

So, I heartily agree that vendor lock-in is bad. [0] However, git doesn't handle mailing lists, or issue trackers, or hands-off repo push access control, or.... So, if you're going to do more than just serving git repos, you're almost certainly going to have to do these things yourself, and you very well might end up doing them in a way that differs from how everyone else is doing them.

I mean, as long as you can get complete exports of the data in the important non-git bits, who cares, right?

[0] I'm STILL mad about how Hangouts turned out.

I feel like if you have so many direct dependencies that you can't keep tabs on them, you simply have too many. Whoever decided it was OK to depend on that library should be able to follow it closely enough to say when it cannot be depended on.

There are a lot of "if's" and many things might go wrong -- there's almost never 100% guarantee, but every mean that makes end product more reliable is a good idea.

"I feel like if you have so many direct dependencies that you can't keep tabs on them, you simply have too many."

Such number of dependencies is common when building custom Kernel/OS + application. Also, I've never mentioned direct dependencies, some are just tools to build tools. It wasn't event that big of a project -- a relatively small (~150 Mb) custom OS with Qt application for an embedded device.

Anyway, a good example of a successful feature request – shared since it might help others in their quest for success – included me attempting to reduce the problem, scoping it and suggesting a solution. If you can find examples of this problem over multiple open source repositories (in my case nodejs) it seems to contribute to it getting fixed.