from Hacker News

Deprecating outdated issues on the GitHub public roadmap

by preya2k on 11/25/24, 8:48 AM with 90 comments

• by latexr on 11/25/24, 10:59 AM

  This is why you don’t announce future changes until they’re essentially ready to go out the door. Apple used to understand this better than most. Until you build the feature, you’ll have people asking you constantly when it’ll be done. After you build it, you’ll have people complaining that it doesn’t work exactly like they imagined it in their head. If you end up not building it and say so, you’ll get attacked for it, even by people who never knew about the plans before the cancellation.

  Keep quiet about internal plans only you can affect. Let features requests come to you, monitor interest in those, and reply if they’re interesting or not feasible, so you can discuss and figure out what would work best for your users. Engage but don’t commit unless you’re certain something will happen.

  I’m surprised the conversation hasn’t devolved to a bigger mess yet (maybe it’s being well moderated). It’s a shame they’re having to preemptively lock issues, but I completely get it. It’s exhausting having to deal with abuse on public forums when you’re on the receiving end and always have to keep your conposure.

• by brainwipe on 11/25/24, 10:33 AM

  The only one that directly annoys me is not being able to have threaded comments at the PR level. https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/552 You can do it with "quoting", which is fine if there are two of you but turns into a mess if there's more than that.

  They've said that they're watching the discussions for feedback, so I hope they listen and implement that one.

  Happy that they are being transparent (rather than letting the issues rot), annoyed that they appear to be prioritising marginally useful AI stuff for basic UX.

• by fergie on 11/25/24, 10:27 AM

  Going to stick my neck out here.

  A lot of these "improvements" fall into the following 3 categories:

  1) More complexity around issue tracking

  2) More complexity around permissions

  3) IDE-ness and general visual-studioification of the web interface.

  Since many of the issues make GitHub bloated and more difficult to use for general use cases, they _should_ be removed.

• by azalemeth on 11/25/24, 10:21 AM

  Ever since GitHub was bought by Microsoft things have got worse for me as an end user -- browser compatibility is worse and I run into bugs frequently when on not-chrome; their academic programme now requires an insanely invasive localisation check that instantly fails for me on Linux and their support couldn't advance the process as I hadn't submitted an application yet; and their tooling slowly pushes people away from FOSS and towards proprietary methods. I wish they'd figure out how to make it a hacker friendly place again.

• by cloudking on 11/25/24, 8:26 PM

  Translation: here's a bunch of useful features requests customers asked for, but we don't have engineering budget to build them and not enough customers asked for them, so we're not building them. Plus they don't say "AI" so our executive team said to axe them.

• by brookman64k on 11/25/24, 9:13 PM

  At my project we are forced to use Enterprise GitHub including Actions. Often 80% of the build time consists of up- or downloading intermediate or final build artifacts. This can take more than 40 minutes which is extremely painful. I was really looking forward to finally getting a speedup here. The promise:

  > GitHub Actions: Artifacts v4 available in GitHub Enterprise Server #930 … We will be extending support for v4 of the actions to upload and download artifacts to GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES). This new version improves artifact upload and download speeds by up to 98%.

  I don‘t understand at all how this is not a priority anymore. :-(

• by simonw on 11/25/24, 10:30 AM

  "After an in-depth review, we’ve identified a number of open issues that have become outdated over time—some for several years."

  Sounds fair enough to me.

• by Kudos on 11/25/24, 10:36 AM

  Where did the "basic functionality" quote come from? I haven't looked at all 42 in detail, but it largely seems like _advanced_ functionality to me.

• by mst on 11/25/24, 11:21 AM

  The trouble with bug tracking / project management software is that everybody wants Just One More Feature.

  But if you implement them all, it will become an overcomplicated mess, somebody will replace it with a simpler version, and the cycle will repeat.

  Would I like some of the features they've decided not to implement? Yes.

  Would I hate the results if they implemented everything on this list? Also yes.

  And making everything configurable so you can pick the exact subset you want is (a) an incredible amount of work to make the resulting combinatorial explosion of possible choices all work nicely (b) tends to inevitably lead to something like JIRA.

  I do appreciate people being annoyed about specific features they'd really like getting removed from the roadmap, but so it goes.

• by Deukhoofd on 11/25/24, 10:36 AM

  There's some weird stuff there.

  > GitHub Actions: Artifacts v4 available in GitHub Enterprise Server

  So they're deprecating Artifacts V3 next week, and now announced they won't upgrade Enterprise Server to v4?

• by philipwhiuk on 11/25/24, 11:41 PM

  Heh even CISA.gov is grumpy: https://github.com/github/roadmap/discussions/1014#discussio...

  Personally I'm not a fan of "we haven't got round to it in ages, let's close it"

  Issues at the bottom of your backlog:

  a) Cost you basically nothing

  b) Document previous demand

  c) Can be useful tasks for new joiners who are skilling up on the project

  d) Can be bumped if demand re-awakens

  e) Documents known feature gaps

• by preya2k on 11/25/24, 8:48 AM

  I assume none of their AI features were deprecated.

• by RadiozRadioz on 11/25/24, 10:56 PM

  This was a bad way to announce closing these issues. With a big list like that, everyone's going to find something they're pissed off about not having. They should have closed the issues slowly and quietly in the background - individually they're small enough that people probably wouldn't notice. But like this, many more people see what's happening and get angry together. Not a good way to do PR.

  Maybe the idea was to rip the band-aid off and hope the outrage burns out quickly.

• by mihaaly on 11/25/24, 10:51 AM

  "At GitHub, transparency and clarity are at the heart of our relationship with the community."

  When these kind of carefully crafted prety slogans has to be a prime statement before anything is told then my suspicious mind gets very alert. Probably even overcompensate. Do people take these kind of forefront self evaluations as facts or have suspicion when this has to be announced and highlighted, stated (instead of being obvious). I do not know why (of course I do!) but these kind of self admirative statements have the opposite effect on me. Even when they are true.

• by shrikant on 11/25/24, 2:07 PM

  I'm confused -- are they just closing the issues because they're outdated for various reasons, or are they yanking those features entirely where there's some attempt already made?

  For example, the top one in that list is the "Command Palette" -- but it's already live and working fine! And I'm pretty sure "Precise code navigation" also already exists for TypeScript.

  So are these features that are already GA going to be removed..?

• by lawgimenez on 11/25/24, 11:18 AM

  I wish they put their focus more on GitHub Projects/Issues, it is just too slow.

• by joeyagreco on 11/25/24, 3:27 PM

  no idea how [this](https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/552) was closed as "outdated"

• by eqvinox on 11/25/24, 9:12 PM

  Is IPv6 reachability on some other issue tracker or why am I not finding it?

• by walterbell on 11/25/24, 10:10 AM

  Could Github developer workflow metadata (e.g. issues) be exported/serialized into a git repo for decentralized replication and/or import into an alternative?

• by MortyWaves on 11/25/24, 7:18 PM

  What the fuck? A casual browse of that list and these are very real features that appear to already have had some development.

  No command palette? JS and TS precise code navigation being cancelled? SSH connections to GitHub Actions?

  What on earth is this new “roadmap” then? More AI garbage slop and less focus on developer tooling and source control?

  This is a very dark day.

• by donatj on 11/25/24, 11:15 AM

  > Commenting on unchanged lines in a pull request

  This is infuriating that it's missing. Not being able to just say "Hey, missed updating this line" is just an insane oversight

• by o_m on 11/25/24, 11:14 AM

  I wish they would put more effort in Github Issues (the project management product). They are so close to have something that just exactly what I need. But it seems like they haven't touched it in a couple of years. There are still many rough edges that has been there since the beta.

• by manicminer on 11/25/24, 11:02 AM

  The inability to comment on any line in a PR is a real pain. I’m disappointed to see the plans for this abandoned.

• by oldpersonintx on 11/25/24, 10:13 AM

  Guess who turned GitHub into a SPOF?

  We did.

• by nixpulvis on 11/25/24, 11:10 AM

  Death by committee or death by microsoft, take your pick.

• by donatj on 11/25/24, 11:06 AM

  I am going to call it, Microsoft has not been particularly good stewards of GitHub.

  They have over complicated so much of it to please corporate customers that it has really lost what made it great to begin with.

  It used to make everything seem simple and manageable. Changes were slow, sure, but they felt like they were at least thought through. The docs used to be simple and easy to navigate. Everything is about 10x more complex now.