If it's someone else's project, they have full authority to decide what is and isn't an issue. With large enough projects, you're going to have enough bad actors, people who don't read error messages, and just downright crazy people. Throw in people using AI for dubious purposes like CVE inflation, and it's even worse.
The trouble here is that github issues is crap. Most bug trackers have ways to triage submissions. When a rando submits something, it has status "unconfirmed". Developers can then recategorize it, delete it, mark it as invalid, confirm that it's a real bug and mark it "confirmed", etc. Github issues is mostly a discussion system that was so inadequate that they supplemented it with another discussion system.
> Most bug trackers have ways to triage submissions. When a rando submits something, it has status "unconfirmed". Developers can then recategorize it, delete it, mark it as invalid, confirm that it's a real bug and mark it "confirmed", etc.
As far as I'm aware, most large open GitHub projects use tags for that kind of classification. Would you consider that too clunky?
IMO it still has poor discoverability, constant filtering between the triage status flags and non-flagged stuff, stuff that might not have been flagged by accident, reporters putting tags on issues themselves, issues can only be closed by non-admins rather than truly deleted, random people complaining about this or that on unrelated tickets...
It all stems from the fact that all issues are in this one large pool rather than there being a completely separate list with already vetted stuff that nobody else can write into.
You're 100% correct. I had a CVE reported to me in ~2022, shortly after the ChatGPT launch. I spent 4 hours slicing and dicing the issue, responding to how it was wrong, linking to background information, specific lines in the code, and then asking for or what am I missing. The response was literally "shrugs AI". Good for them.
Yeah but the article / post linked does not say that they won't look at reports of bugs or security problems, just that they are using issues to manage things they have decided are issues that should be worked on, and so public reporting using issues tickets will mess up that system they have. It's purely about their project's use of the issues system in github.
Unfortunately there is no such magic bullet for trawling through bug reports from users, but pushing more work out to the reporter can be reasonably effective at avoiding that kind of time wasting. Require that the reporters communicate responsively, that they test things promptly, that they provide reproducers and exact recipes for reproduction. Ask that they run git bisect / creduce / debug options / etc. Proactively close out bugs or mark them appropriately if reporters don't do the work.
I believe most of it is people expecting stuff to work differently, not having time to wrap their head around proper usage of system, because they need specific outcome and they don't need mastery of the tool.
Downside is that "Facebookization" created a trend where people expect everything to be obvious and achievable in minimal amount of clicks, without configuring anything.
Now "LLMization" will push the trend forward. If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box, why would I need to click around or type some arcane configuration for a tool?
I don't think in general it is bad - it is only bad for specialist software where you cannot use that software without deeper understanding, but the expectation is still there.
It is weird to push the idea that Facebook is some kind of pinacle of good and easy to use UI. That's the first one. It's quite the opposite, with people constantly complaining how bad, clunky and confusing Facebook is. And it is not the recent trend either. It has always been this way and e.g. VK has always had a better UI/UX that Facebook (and Telegram's is better that Whatsapp's).
> If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box
IME, people cannot even articulate what they want when the know what they want, let alone when they don’t even understand what they want in the first place.
Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out. That ghostty finds discussions to be a better way to triage user requests/issues is somewhat quirky, although a perfectly valid option. As is just using issues, imo. Just good to make sure users know how to report an issue, and what information to include.
To be clear, I think discussions on the whole as a product are pretty bad. I'm not happy having to use them, but given my experience trying different approaches across multiple "popular" projects on GH, this approach has so far been the least bad. Although I'm still sad about it.
> Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out.
Agreed. This highlights GitHub's issue management system being inadequate.
Don't forget the rude, entitled, and aggressive, they are legion.
It's simply a great idea. The mindset should be 'understand what's happening', not 'this is the software's fault'.
The discussion area also serves as a convenient explanation/exploration of the surrounding issues that is easy to find. It reduces the maintainer's workload and should be the default.
That's a shame to hear. I had to give up on Ghostty because of its memory leak issue. Granted, it was on an 8GB system, but that should be enough to run a terminal without memory exhaustion a few times a week. Foot has been rock solid, even though it lacks some of Ghostty's niceties.
Note that this is an active discussion where we're trying to get to a point of clarity where we can promote to an issue (when it is actionable). The discussion is open and this is the system working as intended!
I want to clarify though that there isn't a known widespread "memory leak issue." You didn't say "widespread", but just in case that is taken by anyone else. :) To clarify, there are a few challenges here:
1. The report at hand seems to affect a very limited number of users (given the lack of reports and information about them). There are lots of X meme posts about Ghostty in the macOS "Force Close" window using a massive amount of RAM but that isn't directly useful because that window also reports all the RAM _child processes_ are using (e.g. if you run a command in your shell that consumes 100 GB of RAM, macOS reports it as Ghostty using 100 GB of RAM). And the window by itself also doesn't tell us what you were doing in Ghostty. It farms good engagement, though.
2. We've run Ghostty on Linux under Valgrind in a variety of configurations (the full GUI), we run all of Ghostty's unit tests under Valgrind in CI for every commit, and we've run Ghostty on macOS with the Xcode Instruments leak checker in a variety of configurations and we haven't yet been able to find any leaks. Both of these run fully clean. So, the "easy" tools can't find it.
3. Following point 1 and 2, no maintainer familiar with the codebase has ever seen leaky behavior. Some of us run a build of Ghostty, working full time in a terminal, for weeks, and memory is stable.
4. Our Discord has ~30K users, and within it, we only have one active user who periodically gets a large memory issue. They haven't been able to narrow this down to any specific reproduction and they aren't familiar enough with the codebase to debug it themselves, unfortunately. They're trying!
To be clear, I 100% believe that there is some kind of leak affecting some specific configuration of users. That's why the discussion is open and we're soliciting input. I even spent about an hour today on the latest feedback (posted earlier today) trying to use that information to narrow it down. No dice, yet.
If anyone has more info, we'd love to find this. :)
I’ve been a very happy user for 2025, with some edge cases around the terminal not working on remote shells. I haven’t seen any memory leaks, but wanted to say I appreciate this detailed response.
In my experience, the remote shell weirdness is usually because the remote shell doesn’t recognise ghostty’s TERM=xterm-ghostty value. Fixed by either copying over a terminfo with it in, or setting TERM=xterm-256color before ssh’ing: https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo
Valgrind won’t show you leaks where you (or a GC) still holds a reference. This could mean you’re holding on to large chunks of memory that are still referenced in a closure or something. I don’t know what language or anything about your project, but if you’re using a GC language, make sure you disable GC when running with valgrind (a common mistake). You’ll see a ton of false positives that the GC would normally clean up for you, but some of those won’t be false positives.
btw, is it me or is there any justification for anyone including a developer to run more than 8GB of RAM for a laptop? I don't see functionality as having changed in the last 15 years.
For me, only Rust compilation necessitates more RAM. But, I assume devs just do RAM heavy dev work on a server over ssh.
There's all the usual "$APPLICATION is a memory hog" complaints, for one.
In the SWE world, dev servers are a luxury that you don't get in most companies, and most people use their laptops as workstations. Depending on your workflow, you might well have a bunch of VMs/containers running.
Even outside of SWE world, people have plenty of use for more than 8GiB of RAM. Large Photoshop documents with loads of layers, a DAW with a bazillion plugins and samples, anything involving 4k video are all workloads that would struggle running on such a small RAM allowance.
This depends on industry. Around here, working locally on laptop is a luxury, and most devs are required to treat their laptop like a thin client.
Of course, being developer laptops, they all come with 16 gigs of RAM. In contrast, the remote VMs where we do all of the actual work are limited to 4GiB unless we get manager and IT approval for more.
Current job used to let us run containers locally, but they decided to wrap initially docker, and then podman with "helper" scripts. These broke regularly, and became too much overhead to maintain so we are mandated to do local dev but access a dev k8 cluster to perform any level of testing that is more than unit and requires a db.
A really shame as running local docker/podman for postges was fine when you just ran the commands.
I find this quite surprising! What benefit does your org accrue by mandating that the db instance used for testing is centralised? Where I am, the tests simply assume that there’s a database available on a certain port. docker-compose.yml makes it easy to spin this up for those so inclined. At that stage it’s immaterial whether it’s running natively, or in docker, or forwarded from somewhere else. Our tests stump up all the data they need and tear down the db afterwards. In contrast, I imagine that a dev k8s cluster requires some management and would be a single point of failure.
Yes, zero latency typing in your local IDE on a laptop sounds like the dream.
In enterprise, we get shared servers with constant connection issues, performance problems, and full disks.
Alternatively we can use Windows VMs in Azure, with network attached storage where "git log" can take a full minute. And that's apparently the strategic solution.
Not to mention that in Azure 8 CPUs gets you four physical cores of a previous gen server CPU. To anyone working with 4 CPUs or 2 physical cores: good luck.
Browsers can get quite bloated, especially if one is not in the habit of closing tabs or restarting it from time to time. IDEs, other development tools, and most Electron abominations are also not shy about guzzling memory.
How much would it take up if there was less RAM available. A web browser with a bunch of tabs open but not active seems like the type of system that can increase RAM usage by caching, and decrease it by swapping (either logically at the application level, or letting the OS actually swap)
The issue for me is that bookmarks suck. They don't store the state (where I was reading) and they reload the webpage so I might get something else entirely when I come back. They also kinda just disappear from sight.
If instead bookmarks worked like tab saving does, I would be happy to get rid of a few hundred tabs. Have them save the page and state like the tab saving mechanism does. Have some way to remind me of them after a week or month or so.
Combine that with a search function that can search in contents as well as the title, and I'm changing habbits ASAP.
Regarding wanting to preserve the current version of a page: I use Karakeep to archive those pages. I am sure there are other similar solutions such as downloading an offline version, but this works well for me.
I do this mostly for blog posts etc I might not get around to reading for weeks or months from now, and don't want them to disappear in the meantime.
Everything else is either a pinned tab (<5) or a bookmark (themselves shared when necessary on e.g a Slack canvas so the whole team has easy access, not just me).
While browsing the rest of my tabs are transient and don't really grow. I even mostly use private browsing for research, and only bookmark (or otherwise save) pages I deem to be of high quality. I might have a private window with multiple tabs for a given task, but it is quickly reduced to the minimum necessary pages and the the whole private window is thrown away once the initial source material gathering is done. This lets me turn off address bar search engines and instead search only saved history and bookmarks.
I often see colleagues with the same many browser windows of many tabs each open struggling to find what they need, and ponder their methods.
I've started using Karakeep as well, however I don't find its built-in viewer as seamless as a plain browser page. It's also runs afoul of pages which combats bots due to its headless chrome.
Anyway, just strikes me as odd that the browsers have the functionality right there, it's just not used to its full potential.
I wonder if a good public flogging would compel chrome and web devs to have 80 tabs take up far less than a gigabyte of memory like they should in a world where optimization wasn’t wholesale abandoned under the assumption that hardware improvements would compensate for their laziness and incompetence.
There is no justification for that IMHO. The program text only needs to be in memory once. However, each process probably has its own instance of the JS engine, together with the website's heap data and the JIT-compiled code objects. That adds up.
I’m honestly amazed OP is managing 30 GB regularly. I’d wager it’s a tall tale. It’s sort of perfect troll bait on a forum because you end up with people sounding nuts, defending web browser ram usage, against the common position, that browsers are RAM hogs.
If I'm doing work than involves three different libraries, I'm not reading and committing to memory the whole documentation for each of those libraries. I might well have a few tabs with some of those libraries' source files too. I can easily end up with tens of tabs open as a form of breadcrumb trail for an issue I'm tracking down.
Then there's all the basic stuff — email and calendar are tabs in my browser, not standalone applications. Ditto the the ticket I'm working on.
I think the real issue is that browsers need to some lightweight "sleep" mechanism that sits somewhere between a live tab and just keeping the source in cache.
People complain about Github not allowing you to turn off issues and pull requests entirely, but I've always seen it as a positive. It means the truth about code quality, potential caveats, and better forked revisions can disseminate freely even when the author disappears. It becomes a spamfest at times, but is still probably a net positive for the ecosystem.
That being said, as long as you still have the discussion tab, auto-deleting all issues by default is not a big deal.
It's a good idea to reserve issues for well-defined, actionable stuff.
IRL every dev issue tracker needs a front-end bozo filter to handle the low-hanging fruit and the misunderstandings and the failures to RTFM and the cases of PEBCAK.
Personally, I find the distinction between “issues” and “discussions” annoying.
For one, it duplicates the efforts in checking for prior reports. I might try 5–6 sets of keywords, but now I have to do so for 2 separate trackers.
Tickets cannot be moved between trackers, so instead folks resort to duplicating it and moving discussions… which is entirely opaque if you’re following up via email: you won’t get any more notifications and your future replies are silently discarded.
As a maintainer, having two trackers per project never made sense to me, so I’ve disabled discussion everywhere.
This is mostly a criticism of how GitHub implemented this feature, not of the decision taken here.
At the very least I think what matters here is the process. The same exact process could be implemented via, for example, issue labels. It would not be hard for maintainers to search for issues with label "bug", which only maintainers can assign. There are clear UX tradeoffs between the two approaches.
Why would checking be duplicated? One would need to check only the discussions in this case, since issues will be created from discussions once something is ready to be worked on (as I understood it)
I'm a fan of this. My own projects on GitHub have an action[1] which autocloses and autolocks any opened issues until they have been reviewed and accepted by me, and I only consider feature requests from sponsors.
The real miss here is that there isn't a way on GitHub to only allow maintainers to create issues, instead we are left with these subpar workarounds.
I've seen other projects that do this, and it makes a lot of sense. A discussion forum is a good place to start. It seems though that many projects don't have the Github "discussions" activated.
As a maintainers, if you want to be be able to tell real issues from non-issue discussions, you still gave to read them (triage). That's what's taking time.
I don't see how transforming a discussion into an issue is less effort than the other way around. Both are a click.
Github's issues and discussions seem the same feature to me (almost identical UI with different naming).
The only potential benefit I can see is that discussions have a top-level upvote count.
If discussions had a more modern UI with threads or something then the difference might be real. But AFAICT it’s the same set of functionality, so it’s effectively equivalent to a tag.
They sorta do: each comment on a discussion starts a thread you can reply to, unlike on issues where you have to keep quoting each other to track a topic if there’s more than one. It still sucks, especially since long threads are collapsed and thus harder to ctrl-f or link a reply, but it’s something.
> able to tell real issues from non-issue discussions
imo almost all issues are real, including "non-issue" - i think you mean non-bug - "discussions." for example it is meaningful that discussions show a potential documentation feature, and products like "a terminal" are complete when their features are authored and also fully documented or discoverable (so intuitive as to not require documentation).
99% of the audience of github projects are other developers, not non-programmer end users. it is almost always wrong to think of issues as not real, every open source maintainer who gets hung up on wanting a category of issues narrower than the ones needed to make their product succeed winds up delegating their product development to a team of professionals and loses control (for an example that I know well: ComfyUI).
Why do you say that? Curl (arguably one of the most used open source software in the world) currently has 5 open issues https://github.com/curl/curl/issues
Because I don't want my default view to be "triage." If GitHub allowed default issue views (and reflected that in the issue count in the tabs as well), then maybe. But currently, it doesn't work. I've tried it at large project scale across many (multiple projects with more than 20K stars and millions of downloads).
Compared to that, this system has been a huge success. It has its own problems, but it's directionally better.
For one, it might require several rounds of back and forth before its ready to receive the tag, but now the details are spread across several comments instead of neatly at the top
GitHub desperately needs a feature to pin comments in issues or sort by reactions.
Very often in those infamous bugs that has been open for years, having hundreds of ”me too” comments, there are gems with workarounds or reproductions, unfortunately hidden somewhere under 4 iterations of ”click to load 8 more comments”, making it difficult to find. This generates even more ”anyone know how to solve this” spam, further contributing to the difficulty to find the good post.
that solution is not trivial because it requires permission for anyone to comment on issues, which invites irrelevant or unhelpful comments or even complaints. the separation allows issues to be limited to developers only, those who actually work to fix the issues.
technically, messages are messages. this approach no more than grouping messages into different forums. it could also all be under discussion with a sub forum for issues, one for features, one for other topics, etc, and then there would need to be a permission system for each sub forum.
so all this does is to create two spheres of access for users and developers. and that's the point.
in the end it's really a matter of taste and preference.
That's not true, you can limit comments to collaborators if you don't like them. Although note that it's something you've made up, comments are not part of the original list of reasons. Moreover, comments aren't limited in the actual issues, so nothing prevents unhelpful comments, leaving your issue unresolved
An non-issue raised as an issue can never be closed, because the person who reported it will just open another one saying "Why did you close my issue without fixing it?" If that user is also raising valid, useful issues then you don't want to just ban them. Consequently your issues list will become unmanageable.
I'm not saying it does. I'm saying that banning a user who is making a mistake in one area means you lose the value they provide in another (which might be valid issues, but equally it might be 90% of your revenue or something), so it's not always an obvious decision to just wield the ban hammer every time. Moving discussion of issues before they're created to a separate place helps keep the issue tracker focused on issues that are likely to be addressed.
An additional benefit of that is that a user whose discussion leads to a real issue being created will feel like they're genuinely being listened to. That creates a good customer experience, which is good for your brand's reputation. It's a positive experience. Closing non-issues in the tracker is a negative experience.
How is it not trivially solved by a discussion section? Why is your solution better for someone else's work flow? Why do you feel like you get to impose your way of doing work on an open source project?
Why do you feel like it's ok to make up nonsense about imposing? How can I impose anything on that project? Why break the expected/established workflow of users if the explanation doesn't work? Why are you asking 3 questions without answering 1?
each project has its own workflow. no established workflow is broken. github traditionally imposed a different workflow because initially it didn't even have discussions.
I agree with the general philosophy about user submissions. Browsing closed discussions looks a lot like browsing closed issues. So I'm not sure that the policy is successfully turning bug reports into discussions. But it's at least keeping Issues free from noise for contributors. Github could do more to nudge users into approaching Discussions differently. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions?discussio...
The point is the opposite, AFAICT. Any user complaint starts as a discussion. If an actionable bug report results from it, it goes to the tracker, which serves as list of problems to work on. A lot of discussions do not end this way, even though they may solve a user's issue anyway, e.g. by providing advice and reference.
Definitely discussing things could also happen in the issue tracker, and some <Actionable> tag could be used to mark issues that are ready to work upon. But I suspect that Discussions are better suited for, well, discussions, while the facilities of the issue tracker can then be used by maintainers / contributors.
Agreed. IMO, it makes sense to have a way to triage possible issues, confirm that they are, in fact, legitimate, and then create issue records to reflect them. As long as users have a way to report anomalous behavior, then, as you say, it’s really no different than using tags on issues. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
A couple of big projects in the python space use this approach. Pisses me off as a power user. I find what are clearly bugs all the time, and am forced through a funnel that places the burden on me. Stinks of arrogance to think your project is that rock solid you should add friction for reporting bugs. Especially in “forever v0” projects.
I always struggle to understand this level of entitlement. No one is forcing you to use any of these projects. The vast majority of the time, drive-by bug reports by users are a complete waste of time because they're either a user error or not described in sufficient detail to debug. In other words, mostly noise, and adding more noise isn't really helpful.
If you want to contribute, a much better way is to work on bugs that are already well defined. There is generally no shortage of known bugs in software, there is however a shortage of people fixing them.
There's zero entitlement expressed by the parent, he's just trying to help the project, but is encountering unnecessary friction.
It's not that he has some inner urge to contribute in some way, he just encountered a bug while using the software and wants to report it. The alternative isn't coding — it's no contribution at all.
I think this is exactly the point most people miss. No contribution is better than bad contribution. Most issues people file are bad. I previously worked at a major OSS company and the vast majority of bug reports are just noise. It takes time to sift through them and they add no value, just waste time. If people did less of that, that would be a good outcome, not a bad one. Sure, there's useful reports there sometimes, but it's more rare than you'd think. On top of that, many of those are dupes of issues we've already found and filed, just haven't had time to fix yet.
Maintainers did a bunch of useful work for them and they refuse to report issues the way maintainers find the most useful, because it's a burden to help maintainers do all their free work.
The arrogance in in users like yourself who think they know better than the project owners how to run their issue tracker. This is just a variation. It’s not a barrier, it’s an attempt to improve the quality of the issues that are filed in a way that’s more useful for everyone.
Fwiw, you might have misinterpreted the idiomatic expression "all the time" as meaning "100% of the time". It just means "often" or "commonly". The parent is just saying they often find bugs, they know they're bugs through experience.
Of course anyone can make a mistake. Maybe you prefer the 'discussions' route because it's only seemingly then possible for a projects own devs to make a mistake in creating an issue.
This is the natural way to do it. I have had to use the issue tracker for asking questions (support requests) or informing the developer of something (like of implementing a related feature in another software). Clearly, those aren't issues at all, and the normal workflow steps like closing the ticket doesn't make much sense at all. They belong to the discussions list.
Issue trackers should be used exclusively for earmarking and tracking the progress of actionable items. This is somewhat similar to the integration between email clients and task managers, like how it's done in Gmail, Zoho, etc. You read the message first. If it requires an action from your side, create a task from it and link them.
There are other projects that do this too. A good example is the 'mise' project. Sourcehut projects use this workflow almost exclusively since it's the default by design. I think sourcehut had if before github did. What I would like to see is better integration between discussions/messages and task/issue lists on all these platforms.
I think this is the natural process, but how you implement it doesn't matter. A lot of GitHub repos use "unlabelled issue" === "a discussion thread". The benefit is that instead of having to search two separate systems, you can just search one (if you can have an aggregate search over both then it really doesn't matter), these two implementations are isomorphic
I think this is ok. They attempt to add a barrier here, with the attempt to increase the quality of the issue suggested. This may not be the only goal; one may be to have fewer issues raised in total. But there may be several advantages, as well as disadvantages with that approach - it is simply a trade-off.
In particular when I maintain an open source project, I have a lack of time in general so I need to move quickly. I actually don't mind issue discussions on my project, but people can not expect me to invest a lot of time into managing all of those; whether this is a discussion or an issue directly, is not so important, but I know that some project owners don't like open issues that remain open for years. It is kind of a difference in philosophy here.
One trade off is that I am not so likely to get involved in such a project. I may start a discussion, but in general I am very chaotic and may never follow up on discussions I started, simply due to lack of time, too many things to do, forgetting too much too (I do keep notes locally, but these files just keep on growing!).
Yes. Even for casual users looking for help, it’s nice to know that the “issues” tab is just real issues and not random, duplicated complaints and questions. Especially on a project like this that attracts a lot of attention and is highly sensitive to the user’s very specific environment. Most issues are going to not be bugs, or even something the maintainers can work on directly. Instead of trying to cram everything into Issues, why not use the underutilized Discussions tool? Now the Issues list is much more useful as an active tracker of workable items, and as a historical reference of relatively deduped problems.
One difference is that if I submit an issue, and it requires some back and forth to figure out the actionable improvement, then suddenly the issue is very noisy.
Whereas if it goes via a Discussion first, the back and forth happens elsewhere.
Arguably an separate issue could still do this, but it being a discussion sets the expectation better.
So they are using Issues as a project board to track and manage ongoing work items, but Projects is built for exactly that. May be better in the long term to move project management to Projects and let people file bugs with as little friction as possible.
Just the first thing that popped into my head reading the reasoning. I think it makes a lot of sense to do it like this. Especially for a product which is cross platform that emulates / replaces other known products and on top has extensive configuration options. I also switched over from kitty a couple of weeks back and really like it.
"Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports, but man, AI code analysis is getting really good. There are users out there reporting bugs that don't know ANYTHING about our stack, but are great AI drivers and producing some high quality issue reports.
This person (linked below) was experiencing Ghostty crashes and took it upon themselves to use AI to write a python script that can decode our crash files, match them up with our dsym files, and analyze the codebase for attempting to find the root cause, and extracted that into an Agent Skill.
They then came into Discord, warned us they don't know Zig at all, don't know macOS dev at all, don't know terminals at all, and that they used AI, but that they thought critically about the issues and believed they were real and asked if we'd accept them. I took a look at one, was impressed, and said send them all.
This fixed 4 real crashing cases that I was able to manually verify and write a fix for from someone who -- on paper -- had no fucking clue what they were talking about. And yet, they drove an AI with expert skill.
I want to call out that in addition to driving AI with expert skill, they navigated the terrain with expert skill as well. They didn't just toss slop up on our repo. They came to Discord as a human, reached out as a human, and talked to other humans about what they've done. They were careful and thoughtful about the process.
People like this give me hope for what is possible. But it really, really depends on high quality people like this. Most today -- to continue the analogy -- are unfortunately driving like a teenager who has only driven toy go-karts."
A lot of bugs where I work have the same pattern: one person writes up either what they found to be broken or what they couldn’t do due to a missing feature, then a shadow task is created that describes the bug and what needs to be changed to fix or implement it. I’ve never had problem with both the report and the work-tracker being in the same place but I can see why GitHub calling the product “Issues” might not have been a great name.
Seems great to me. Perhaps GitHub should look into incorporating this into the UX somehow? So many projects are issues linking to other issues, I would love to see other projects adopt this to make github task tracking more usable.
When I have a clear "Issue" which I've already researched, it's a bit of friction, but it doesn't seem like any more work to dump exactly the same text into a Discussion... and yea. Issues becoming a dumping ground is a real issue. This seems like a reasonable strategy / experiment.
What I often do on ZeroFS [0] is to convert issues to discussions, it's a one click operation on github and helps reduce the noise for ill-defined issues.
I have never worked on projects that give non members write access to our bug tracker.
This includes both our open source project not giving the public access. And our entirely closed source internal projects not giving other developers within the company write access.
Sure, issues for tasks and discussions for conversations.
And then there are developers who idly complain about normal participation on the work of issues and coordination of testing and feedback because it sends them a notification that they turned on. Unconstructive bitching drives users and collaborators away. They could solve their notification problem rather than impose a burden and emotional bullshit on everyone else.
Personally, I dig it! Selected parts from linked page:
"""Unlike some other projects, Ghostty does not use the issue tracker for discussion or feature requests. Instead, we use GitHub discussions for that. Once a discussion reaches a point where a well-understood, actionable item is identified, it is moved to the issue tracker. This pattern makes it easier for maintainers or contributors to find issues to work on since every issue is ready to be worked on.
This approach is based on years of experience maintaining open source projects and observing that 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves.[...]"""
> 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves. For what's left, the majority are often feature requests (unimplemented features) and not bugs (malfunctioning features).
I can believe this. I think it depends on the project, but there are certainly some with very high false positives. Maybe that's indicative of a confusing app, I don't know.
Those modern terminal projects have weird defaults and quirky behaviors just to be different.
So to me it's easy to believe that a user expects something to work a certain way, does minimal or no research about it, and go directly to report a bug when in reality it's intented behavior.
This is a good AI application - something which accepts user problem reports and tries to group them together. Maybe even reproducing the bug in a sandbox if the description is good enough. Engaging with the complainant to get more info.
This could be useful if not used for enshittification, where you have to get past the chatbot to reach anybody useful.
> 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves.
Who does this project actually serve? The "users", or someone else?
If I'm getting overwhelmed with hundreds of issues per week about some confusion around installation or use, I think those issues are completely justified. Something should probably be fixed if the happy path is this obscure. Pushing this reality into another bucket is not the solution for me.
As an OSS maintainer myself, while the amount of tickets about a specific topic _might_ be loosely related to the quality of the docs/installation/etc, this hasn't been true in my observations.
It's one of those explanations that sound very plausible on paper, but if you see real world issues it just doesn't happen, users will ask questions that are clearly explained in the first paragraph of the readme, en masse.
Did you also read the part about using Discussions instead? It’s not that users are not allowed to voice feedback, make request, or ask questions. They should just do so in a different place.
> Any Discussion which clearly identifies a problem in Ghostty and can be confirmed or reproduced will be converted to an Issue by a maintainer
If it's someone else's project, they have full authority to decide what is and isn't an issue. With large enough projects, you're going to have enough bad actors, people who don't read error messages, and just downright crazy people. Throw in people using AI for dubious purposes like CVE inflation, and it's even worse.
As far as I'm aware, most large open GitHub projects use tags for that kind of classification. Would you consider that too clunky?
It all stems from the fact that all issues are in this one large pool rather than there being a completely separate list with already vetted stuff that nobody else can write into.
Unfortunately there is no such magic bullet for trawling through bug reports from users, but pushing more work out to the reporter can be reasonably effective at avoiding that kind of time wasting. Require that the reporters communicate responsively, that they test things promptly, that they provide reproducers and exact recipes for reproduction. Ask that they run git bisect / creduce / debug options / etc. Proactively close out bugs or mark them appropriately if reporters don't do the work.
Downside is that "Facebookization" created a trend where people expect everything to be obvious and achievable in minimal amount of clicks, without configuring anything.
Now "LLMization" will push the trend forward. If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box, why would I need to click around or type some arcane configuration for a tool?
I don't think in general it is bad - it is only bad for specialist software where you cannot use that software without deeper understanding, but the expectation is still there.
IME, people cannot even articulate what they want when the know what they want, let alone when they don’t even understand what they want in the first place.
> Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out.
Agreed. This highlights GitHub's issue management system being inadequate.
(Note: I'm the creator/lead of Ghostty)
It's simply a great idea. The mindset should be 'understand what's happening', not 'this is the software's fault'.
The discussion area also serves as a convenient explanation/exploration of the surrounding issues that is easy to find. It reduces the maintainer's workload and should be the default.
but has not graduated to issue worthy status
I want to clarify though that there isn't a known widespread "memory leak issue." You didn't say "widespread", but just in case that is taken by anyone else. :) To clarify, there are a few challenges here:
1. The report at hand seems to affect a very limited number of users (given the lack of reports and information about them). There are lots of X meme posts about Ghostty in the macOS "Force Close" window using a massive amount of RAM but that isn't directly useful because that window also reports all the RAM _child processes_ are using (e.g. if you run a command in your shell that consumes 100 GB of RAM, macOS reports it as Ghostty using 100 GB of RAM). And the window by itself also doesn't tell us what you were doing in Ghostty. It farms good engagement, though.
2. We've run Ghostty on Linux under Valgrind in a variety of configurations (the full GUI), we run all of Ghostty's unit tests under Valgrind in CI for every commit, and we've run Ghostty on macOS with the Xcode Instruments leak checker in a variety of configurations and we haven't yet been able to find any leaks. Both of these run fully clean. So, the "easy" tools can't find it.
3. Following point 1 and 2, no maintainer familiar with the codebase has ever seen leaky behavior. Some of us run a build of Ghostty, working full time in a terminal, for weeks, and memory is stable.
4. Our Discord has ~30K users, and within it, we only have one active user who periodically gets a large memory issue. They haven't been able to narrow this down to any specific reproduction and they aren't familiar enough with the codebase to debug it themselves, unfortunately. They're trying!
To be clear, I 100% believe that there is some kind of leak affecting some specific configuration of users. That's why the discussion is open and we're soliciting input. I even spent about an hour today on the latest feedback (posted earlier today) trying to use that information to narrow it down. No dice, yet.
If anyone has more info, we'd love to find this. :)
For me, only Rust compilation necessitates more RAM. But, I assume devs just do RAM heavy dev work on a server over ssh.
In the SWE world, dev servers are a luxury that you don't get in most companies, and most people use their laptops as workstations. Depending on your workflow, you might well have a bunch of VMs/containers running.
Even outside of SWE world, people have plenty of use for more than 8GiB of RAM. Large Photoshop documents with loads of layers, a DAW with a bazillion plugins and samples, anything involving 4k video are all workloads that would struggle running on such a small RAM allowance.
Of course, being developer laptops, they all come with 16 gigs of RAM. In contrast, the remote VMs where we do all of the actual work are limited to 4GiB unless we get manager and IT approval for more.
A really shame as running local docker/podman for postges was fine when you just ran the commands.
In enterprise, we get shared servers with constant connection issues, performance problems, and full disks.
Alternatively we can use Windows VMs in Azure, with network attached storage where "git log" can take a full minute. And that's apparently the strategic solution.
Not to mention that in Azure 8 CPUs gets you four physical cores of a previous gen server CPU. To anyone working with 4 CPUs or 2 physical cores: good luck.
Sure it is bloated, but it is the stack we have for local development
If instead bookmarks worked like tab saving does, I would be happy to get rid of a few hundred tabs. Have them save the page and state like the tab saving mechanism does. Have some way to remind me of them after a week or month or so.
Combine that with a search function that can search in contents as well as the title, and I'm changing habbits ASAP.
I do this mostly for blog posts etc I might not get around to reading for weeks or months from now, and don't want them to disappear in the meantime.
Everything else is either a pinned tab (<5) or a bookmark (themselves shared when necessary on e.g a Slack canvas so the whole team has easy access, not just me).
While browsing the rest of my tabs are transient and don't really grow. I even mostly use private browsing for research, and only bookmark (or otherwise save) pages I deem to be of high quality. I might have a private window with multiple tabs for a given task, but it is quickly reduced to the minimum necessary pages and the the whole private window is thrown away once the initial source material gathering is done. This lets me turn off address bar search engines and instead search only saved history and bookmarks.
I often see colleagues with the same many browser windows of many tabs each open struggling to find what they need, and ponder their methods.
Anyway, just strikes me as odd that the browsers have the functionality right there, it's just not used to its full potential.
I’m honestly amazed OP is managing 30 GB regularly. I’d wager it’s a tall tale. It’s sort of perfect troll bait on a forum because you end up with people sounding nuts, defending web browser ram usage, against the common position, that browsers are RAM hogs.
Then there's all the basic stuff — email and calendar are tabs in my browser, not standalone applications. Ditto the the ticket I'm working on.
I think the real issue is that browsers need to some lightweight "sleep" mechanism that sits somewhere between a live tab and just keeping the source in cache.
It's a life of luxury, I tell you.
Your second link looks like an X user trying to start a flamewar; the rest of the replies are hidden to me.
I reported the issue in discussions some time ago, but had no reaction/response.
I was able to reproduce the leak consistently. Finally I've got all the reports done by me, Ghostty sources and Claude Code and tried to fix it.
For the first couple of weeks there were no leaks at all, now it started again but only 1/10 of the times it was before.
https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/9786 There are some logs and a Claude Code review md file that might be useful.
Hope it will help someone investigate further.
That being said, as long as you still have the discussion tab, auto-deleting all issues by default is not a big deal.
IRL every dev issue tracker needs a front-end bozo filter to handle the low-hanging fruit and the misunderstandings and the failures to RTFM and the cases of PEBCAK.
For one, it duplicates the efforts in checking for prior reports. I might try 5–6 sets of keywords, but now I have to do so for 2 separate trackers.
Tickets cannot be moved between trackers, so instead folks resort to duplicating it and moving discussions… which is entirely opaque if you’re following up via email: you won’t get any more notifications and your future replies are silently discarded.
As a maintainer, having two trackers per project never made sense to me, so I’ve disabled discussion everywhere.
This is mostly a criticism of how GitHub implemented this feature, not of the decision taken here.
The real miss here is that there isn't a way on GitHub to only allow maintainers to create issues, instead we are left with these subpar workarounds.
[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/blob/master/.github/workf...
If you spend more time closing issues than creating them manually from discussions, the math adds up.
The math is even better if you just ignore all issues and close them after two weeks for being stale!
Wish this was /s but it isn't.
As a maintainers, if you want to be be able to tell real issues from non-issue discussions, you still gave to read them (triage). That's what's taking time.
I don't see how transforming a discussion into an issue is less effort than the other way around. Both are a click.
Github's issues and discussions seem the same feature to me (almost identical UI with different naming).
The only potential benefit I can see is that discussions have a top-level upvote count.
imo almost all issues are real, including "non-issue" - i think you mean non-bug - "discussions." for example it is meaningful that discussions show a potential documentation feature, and products like "a terminal" are complete when their features are authored and also fully documented or discoverable (so intuitive as to not require documentation).
99% of the audience of github projects are other developers, not non-programmer end users. it is almost always wrong to think of issues as not real, every open source maintainer who gets hung up on wanting a category of issues narrower than the ones needed to make their product succeed winds up delegating their product development to a team of professionals and loses control (for an example that I know well: ComfyUI).
How is this not trivially solved via a "ready-to-be-worked-on" tag?
Compared to that, this system has been a huge success. It has its own problems, but it's directionally better.
Very often in those infamous bugs that has been open for years, having hundreds of ”me too” comments, there are gems with workarounds or reproductions, unfortunately hidden somewhere under 4 iterations of ”click to load 8 more comments”, making it difficult to find. This generates even more ”anyone know how to solve this” spam, further contributing to the difficulty to find the good post.
technically, messages are messages. this approach no more than grouping messages into different forums. it could also all be under discussion with a sub forum for issues, one for features, one for other topics, etc, and then there would need to be a permission system for each sub forum.
so all this does is to create two spheres of access for users and developers. and that's the point.
in the end it's really a matter of taste and preference.
An additional benefit of that is that a user whose discussion leads to a real issue being created will feel like they're genuinely being listened to. That creates a good customer experience, which is good for your brand's reputation. It's a positive experience. Closing non-issues in the tracker is a negative experience.
Is it really that hard to open a discussion?
Definitely discussing things could also happen in the issue tracker, and some <Actionable> tag could be used to mark issues that are ready to work upon. But I suspect that Discussions are better suited for, well, discussions, while the facilities of the issue tracker can then be used by maintainers / contributors.
I find this separation pretty smart.
I personally, use GH Issues for my own work, but there’s hardly any, so it’s not a burden. I’m a non-fan of JIRA.
I have seen GH Issues turn into Reddit-like flamefests. Not my idea of productive work.
But, I am super lazy.
If you want to contribute, a much better way is to work on bugs that are already well defined. There is generally no shortage of known bugs in software, there is however a shortage of people fixing them.
It's not that he has some inner urge to contribute in some way, he just encountered a bug while using the software and wants to report it. The alternative isn't coding — it's no contribution at all.
Owning a project is counter-productive for QA. If it’s your project, you know where to click and where to not click.
OTOH, you don’t need to know anything about a project to conclude that a crash with access violation, or hang with 100% CPU usage, are clearly bugs.
Of course anyone can make a mistake. Maybe you prefer the 'discussions' route because it's only seemingly then possible for a projects own devs to make a mistake in creating an issue.
Issue trackers should be used exclusively for earmarking and tracking the progress of actionable items. This is somewhat similar to the integration between email clients and task managers, like how it's done in Gmail, Zoho, etc. You read the message first. If it requires an action from your side, create a task from it and link them.
There are other projects that do this too. A good example is the 'mise' project. Sourcehut projects use this workflow almost exclusively since it's the default by design. I think sourcehut had if before github did. What I would like to see is better integration between discussions/messages and task/issue lists on all these platforms.
In particular when I maintain an open source project, I have a lack of time in general so I need to move quickly. I actually don't mind issue discussions on my project, but people can not expect me to invest a lot of time into managing all of those; whether this is a discussion or an issue directly, is not so important, but I know that some project owners don't like open issues that remain open for years. It is kind of a difference in philosophy here.
One trade off is that I am not so likely to get involved in such a project. I may start a discussion, but in general I am very chaotic and may never follow up on discussions I started, simply due to lack of time, too many things to do, forgetting too much too (I do keep notes locally, but these files just keep on growing!).
Somehow the distinction of just adding a tag / using filters doesn't communicate the cultural/process distinction in the same way.
Whereas if it goes via a Discussion first, the back and forth happens elsewhere.
Arguably an separate issue could still do this, but it being a discussion sets the expectation better.
Just the first thing that popped into my head reading the reasoning. I think it makes a lot of sense to do it like this. Especially for a product which is cross platform that emulates / replaces other known products and on top has extensive configuration options. I also switched over from kitty a couple of weeks back and really like it.
"Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports, but man, AI code analysis is getting really good. There are users out there reporting bugs that don't know ANYTHING about our stack, but are great AI drivers and producing some high quality issue reports.
This person (linked below) was experiencing Ghostty crashes and took it upon themselves to use AI to write a python script that can decode our crash files, match them up with our dsym files, and analyze the codebase for attempting to find the root cause, and extracted that into an Agent Skill.
They then came into Discord, warned us they don't know Zig at all, don't know macOS dev at all, don't know terminals at all, and that they used AI, but that they thought critically about the issues and believed they were real and asked if we'd accept them. I took a look at one, was impressed, and said send them all.
This fixed 4 real crashing cases that I was able to manually verify and write a fix for from someone who -- on paper -- had no fucking clue what they were talking about. And yet, they drove an AI with expert skill.
I want to call out that in addition to driving AI with expert skill, they navigated the terrain with expert skill as well. They didn't just toss slop up on our repo. They came to Discord as a human, reached out as a human, and talked to other humans about what they've done. They were careful and thoughtful about the process.
People like this give me hope for what is possible. But it really, really depends on high quality people like this. Most today -- to continue the analogy -- are unfortunately driving like a teenager who has only driven toy go-karts."
"Examples: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions?discussio... "
When I have a clear "Issue" which I've already researched, it's a bit of friction, but it doesn't seem like any more work to dump exactly the same text into a Discussion... and yea. Issues becoming a dumping ground is a real issue. This seems like a reasonable strategy / experiment.
[0] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS
This includes both our open source project not giving the public access. And our entirely closed source internal projects not giving other developers within the company write access.
And then there are developers who idly complain about normal participation on the work of issues and coordination of testing and feedback because it sends them a notification that they turned on. Unconstructive bitching drives users and collaborators away. They could solve their notification problem rather than impose a burden and emotional bullshit on everyone else.
"""Unlike some other projects, Ghostty does not use the issue tracker for discussion or feature requests. Instead, we use GitHub discussions for that. Once a discussion reaches a point where a well-understood, actionable item is identified, it is moved to the issue tracker. This pattern makes it easier for maintainers or contributors to find issues to work on since every issue is ready to be worked on.
This approach is based on years of experience maintaining open source projects and observing that 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves.[...]"""
Do I ever make mistakes?
No. It’s the users who are wrong.
So to me it's easy to believe that a user expects something to work a certain way, does minimal or no research about it, and go directly to report a bug when in reality it's intented behavior.
This could be useful if not used for enshittification, where you have to get past the chatbot to reach anybody useful.
Who does this project actually serve? The "users", or someone else?
If I'm getting overwhelmed with hundreds of issues per week about some confusion around installation or use, I think those issues are completely justified. Something should probably be fixed if the happy path is this obscure. Pushing this reality into another bucket is not the solution for me.
It's one of those explanations that sound very plausible on paper, but if you see real world issues it just doesn't happen, users will ask questions that are clearly explained in the first paragraph of the readme, en masse.
> Any Discussion which clearly identifies a problem in Ghostty and can be confirmed or reproduced will be converted to an Issue by a maintainer