How to be an open source gardener (2014)

This post is (2014), but I still stand by it today. I still do a lot of this kind of thing. Happy to answer questions, as always.<p>&gt; For Rust, we have issues for feature requests, meta-issues… everything.<p>This has changed, now Rust has the RFC process for feature requests.

I hope GitHub could add some features to help Open Source maintainers. Allow adding contributors with issue triaging privileges is an obvious one. Required fields (link to repro, software version) could be really helpful too.<p>Currently people have to work around these issues in awkward ways, like creating a whole organization just to grant issue triaging privileges or redirecting people off GitHub for filing issues with required fields [0]. Those workarounds run into limits quickly.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;new-issue.vuejs.org&#x2F;?repo=vuejs&#x2F;vue" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;new-issue.vuejs.org&#x2F;?repo=vuejs&#x2F;vue</a>

I thought this was going to be about actual gardening and am a bit disappointed.

We should move towards application architectures that allow recording app behavior in a reproducible way.<p>If every application had the ability to record input, output and state for a given interaction then reproducibility wouldn&#x27;t be such a huge burden.<p>Is this really a pipe dream?

The npm project moved their issues from github [1] to discourse [2]. I briefly tried to find my open issue [3] in the new discourse search and couldn&#x27;t. That is one way to garden.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;npm&#x2F;npm&#x2F;issues" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;npm&#x2F;npm&#x2F;issues</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;npm.community&#x2F;c&#x2F;bugs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;npm.community&#x2F;c&#x2F;bugs</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;npm&#x2F;npm&#x2F;issues&#x2F;20072" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;npm&#x2F;npm&#x2F;issues&#x2F;20072</a>

Popular projects seem to be flooded with issues. Visual Studio Code release notes [1] has interesting graphs showing how the number of issues start to rise immediately when no one is taking care of them.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;updates&#x2F;v1_28" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;updates&#x2F;v1_28</a>

&quot;Writing a patch is the easiest part of open source. The truly hard stuff is all of the rest: bug trackers, mailing lists, documentation, and other management tasks.&quot; Truth.