[mosquitto-dev] the state of the issue tracker

[Greg Troxel <gdt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

These comments are based on maintaining an unrelated program.

The issue tracker has 730 issues open.   Many are questions, and many
are low-quality bug reports.  This makes it very hard to find useful
content, and to think about what needs fixing.

My view is that it is a bug of github culture that people ask questions
and ask for support in issues.

I would recommend:

  1) adopt a policy that the issue tracker is only for bug reports that
  are both

    a) are against the most recent release or the tip of master (regardless
    of what version the use has because they are running FooOS LTS)

    b) are high quality (have enough data to argue reasonably convincingly
    that there is a bug and that it is likely in mosquitto)

  and feature requests that are both

    a) expressed clearly enough to be implementable

    b) expected to be of reasonably wide interest

  As part of "high quality", expect submitters to retest with recent
  code and engage in debugging.

  2) Add a wiki page for features that aren't going to happen, and list
  them there, and close the feature requests (for otherwise valid
  feature requests, eg. https://github.com/eclipse/mosquitto/issues/3085).

  3) Document that FooOS shipping old versions is a FooOS problem and
  should be addressed to FooOS, not the mosquitto project.

  4) Document that CI binaries are for CI and that them not being
  available on BarOS is not a bug, and hence appropriate for help
  channel not the issue tracker.

  5) Define a help path.  Probably a mosquitto-users mailinglist, and
  perhaps github discusssions.  But github discussions either burden
  those who are subscribed to the repo, or don't work, IMHO.

  6) put a pointer to issue tracker policies at the top of the README
  and in a template
  
  7) Start closing questions and requests for help, ruthlessly, with a
  simple "Please see
  <URL-that-defines-tracker-policy-and-points-to-help-channel>."

I realize this may seem harsh, but where we are now is an issue tracker
that is very hard to use.