What are issues?¶

Issues are commonly either bugs in your project or feature requests. They are not support requests / discussions; those should be handled outside the issue tracking system, for instance in a forum.

Issue tracking¶

Open-source projects should have a single issue tracking system. It's okay to have one tracking system cover multiple small repositories.

Your users (not just the developers) should be able to

submit new issues
see progress with issues
see code and design changes caused by handling issues
comment on existing issues
see and search existing issues

The number of open issues, the response time to issues, and the number of recently closed issues are key indicators of the health of an open-source project.

Projects hosted at gitlab.cern.ch¶

Use gitlab issues, but be aware of the access limitations. Projects created on Gitlab come with issue tracking enabled by default; you can enable it in the project's settings. If your main customers use CERN's Jira instance then use Jira, too; disable Gitlab's issue tracking in the project's settings.

Projects hosted at github.com¶

Use github issues. Issue tracking can be enabled in the repository's settings.