GitHub: You've been asking for it. You know the issue(s). Delete 'em

https://twitter.com/github/status/1060233780114288640

53 19 8 years ago

Avamander2• 8 years ago

I see a lot of potential for abuse. Maintainers should not have the power to make everything they don't like disappear. Neither do I see what this feature tries to solve that say filtering out closed issues with `invalid` tag doesn't.

halfastack2• 8 years ago

Well... As a maintainer of multiple repos:

a) If you don't trust the maintainer, the project is already dead.

b) If the maintainer is power hungry, you're already screwed.

Sometimes, we seek for programmatic solutions where trust should be employed. If you can't trust the maintainer, just forget about the project, regardless of whether maintainer can delete issues or not. I mean, we can already force push to delete history, for example.

Avamander2• 8 years ago

a) The project might be used by other people - say a public disclosure of a vulnerability after no reaction

b) The deletion action is much much more extreme than what a maintainer could do before. Anything controversial is still quite public vs. now it can be just deleted without a trace.

craftyguy2• 8 years ago

a) If you don't trust the maintainer, the project is already dead.

I feel like this argument doesn't really address the problem that non-delete-able issues helps to address. You may trust a maintainer right up until they do something that causes you to distrust them. This takes away your ability to continuously audit the maintainer and takes away data points which may cause you to suddenly distrust them.

rurban• 8 years ago

Unfortunately not.

The use case for issue deletion are security issues, which should at least be hidden from public for some time. deletion would work as simple ad-hoc feature until hiding issues (visible only to creator and admin) can be implemented. it's ruby so I guess it would take 6 months for such feature.

jacques_chester• 8 years ago

Neither do I see what this feature tries to solve that say filtering out closed issues with `invalid` tag doesn't.

My first thought: security disclosures.

moosingin3space• 8 years ago

I'd like to comment here that issue trackers are tools for maintainers, not for users. A maintainer doesn't owe you any response to issues, nor do they owe you any way to report them. The maintainer has the right to stop working on their code at any point and completely take it off GitHub at their own discretion, should they want to.

(If you think that issue trackers should be for users to be able to tell each other if they've experienced the issue too, then that's part of the problem with "+1", "Me too", "fix this please", and other useless comments. That's what a forum is for, and today they're super-easy to create. You don't even have to host them yourself, nor do you need to be affiliated with the project!)

Lesson: if you don't trust the maintainers, you can't trust the software. Keep your own fork and issue tracker if this is a problem, but don't force maintainers, many of whom are not acting in a professional product management capacity, to do extra work for your benefit.

rleigh• 8 years ago

Most bugtrackers don't allow outright deletion of tickets. They allow closing them as invalid/irrelevant/offtopic or whatever tagging metadata that particular system allows, but they don't allow for deletion. There's a permanent public record and audit trail.

I feel that most of your comments are misdirected here. GitHub issues already allowed "+1" and other markers on the issue or its comments. That's not really germane to deleting an issue completely.

And regarding trackers being for maintainers, that's not strictly correct. They are for end use by maintainers durig the course of their work, but they are in many projects the interface between users and developers for officially reporting problems, including outright bugs to usability concerns and feature requests. Part of the unwritten contract here is that users will use the system for its intended purpose. But the other side is that developers will take that feedback seriously and use it appropriately. Censoring by deletion is a rather dramatic change, and not one I'm sure is for the best. There have been many instances where unprofessional behaviour has been visible because of the public audit trail, as well as where controversial issues have been openly discussed. Allowing any dissenting opinions to be silenced is not necessarily for the greater good.

geezerjay• 8 years ago

Maintainers should not have the power to make everything they don't like disappear.

Why not? It's their project, it's their time they are spending working on their project. Why should a random user who contributed nothing to a project have power over those who created the software and donate their time and expertise to the benefit of others?

hitekker• 8 years ago

Passive-aggressive and coercive maintainers will almost certainly abuse this power.

My uninformed guess is that enterprise users asked for this feature for their own repos and it was eventually cargo-culted into the OSS side.

More reason to use Gitlab, I suppose.

halfastack2• 8 years ago

No passive-aggressive and coercive maintainers on Gitlab? Huh! a three-letter change will save your projects it seems :)

ivanfon• 8 years ago

I think they meant that you can’t delete issues on Gitlab, not a comment on the quality of maintainers on Gitlab as opposed to Github.

It seems like you can actually delete issues on GL, but only project owners: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issues/deleting_issu...

Waterluvian• 8 years ago

Super valuable for private orgs!

bostonvaulter2• 8 years ago

I hope you can see the list of deleted issue #'s, not the content, but just enough to get a feel for if there is an unnecessarily large amount of issue deletion going on.

johnsonjo• 8 years ago

This seems good. I once saw a very cringey question asked on a transgender developer’s Ask me Anything (AMA) repo that was totally inappropriate harassment. It made me feel bad that they couldn’t delete the issue.

louiz• 8 years ago

Using github's issues as a question forum is probably a great misuse...

MitchellCash• 8 years ago

I can see use cases for a delete function, but as people mention it’s all about how you manage abuse.

If a project owner really wanted they could just delete the whole repo (which includes issues et all) with no warning or confirmation from collaborators. But that’s a larger more destructive move, whereas, deleting a politically fuelled issue can be abused with far less repercussion.

Not on an issue, but I did once have a moment where I could have used a delete function on a pull request. I merged a pull request with my personal account on a repository I had only been working on under a pseudonym. From memory even resetting to an earlier commit and re-merging again with the correct identity didn’t work as GitHub kept a record of the original merge on that pull request. Which only further tied my two identities together as I tried to correct the mistake.

GitHub: You've been asking for it. You know the issue(s). Delete 'em

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