Out of sight out of mind

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d]

On 15/06/14 17:37, Andrew Edwards via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Observe the following truths:
>      1) Issue tricking and resolution are kept separate in our community
>      2) That which is not visible garners no attention

Without wanting to get into the broader debate going on here, there are a few 
things that can easily be done to fix the visibility problem: add a link to the 
issue tracker right next to the top of the README file for dmd and druntime.

Phobos already has such a link, but it's to the old address d.puremagic.com, so 
that needs to be updated.

In principle this could be supplemented by adding one GitHub issue to each 
project, titled something like "Issue tracking is provided on issues.dlang.org".

> Take issue #143 for instance. It is the oldest open issue on the DLang Issue
> Tracking System. Submitted by Jarrett Billingsley on May 17, 2006, it received
> one comment two days later but was ignored for four years before Michal Minich
> made the second comment. Another two years went by before Martin Nowak addressed
> the issue, which Walter promptly reverted (reason unknown). The end result?
> Eight years flew by and the issue remains unresolved.
>
> This happens because we have two separate systems (one tracking problems,
> another tracking the resolution), both of which compete for the same precious
> and extremely limited resource: the volunteer time of developers.

I don't think that competition for attention between GitHub and issues.dlang.org 
is really the problem here.  The problem is that when you have a scale of issues 
as we do, it's easy for individual issues to get lost unless someone goes out of 
their way to find and address them.

Actually, in my experience, GitHub issues become pretty difficult to keep track 
of with far fewer total open issues.

If there is an issue with issues.dlang.org it's probably the good old "multiple 
logins" problem: perhaps some people don't sign up to report or comment on 
issues because they can't be bothered to have Yet Another Login.