
GitHub has 11,995,200 open issues - chris-at
https://github.com/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+
======
holman
Fun to see this up here. Originally when I built this there was some
discussion on whether it made any sense to show a global view; most people are
just going to use the issues dashboard to look at their own issues, obviously.
Honestly, I just thought it was cool to have filters across the whole site, so
I left it in (which was only an option given how quick it was to calculate and
return these results in Elasticsearch — that's also part of the reason the
numbers are fluctuating a bit, as some have pointed out here).

Still wish more people knew about this dashboard view into Issues. Even though
it's now a prominent link in the header, I don't think the page got to be
something I was really happy with — most of the work was done in the final
week before we shipped Issues, so it was somewhat an afterthought. There's a
ton of power in there, but it's hidden away behind an arcane syntax that I,
the creator of the damn thing, can't really remember at this point, two years
later, ha. Still dig the overall motivation behind the page, though!

~~~
willvarfar
Issues could be integrated much better with forks.

If I have a fork of something, I should see not just issues people post in my
repo, but issues people post in other forks.

These are differentiated visually, and perhaps don't trigger notifications.

When someone fixes the issue in another fork, I should see a 'patch pending'
kind of thing, and get a notification.

~~~
robbiemitchell
This might be another reason why Holman thinks branches are better than forks.

cf.
[https://twitter.com/holman/status/661365207143333888](https://twitter.com/holman/status/661365207143333888),
[https://twitter.com/holman/status/661357354827448321](https://twitter.com/holman/status/661357354827448321)

~~~
pavel_lishin
He seems to think that this is only the case for organizations, not open
source projects:
[https://twitter.com/holman/status/661384740927242240](https://twitter.com/holman/status/661384740927242240)

------
shoyer
Sorted by +1s:
[https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+sort%3Areac...](https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc)

Here are the top three:

1\. Contribution graph can be harmful to contributors
([https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/627](https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/627))

2\. proposal: generic programming facilities
([https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292))

3\. Proper tabs for open files
([https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/224](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/224))

Can't say I'm terribly surprised!

~~~
ekns
Funny how it says there's 479830 pages worth of results and even has a link to
that "last page".

I checked and in practice it "only" returns the first 400 pages of results.

~~~
stephengillie
That sounds like an issue. I wonder if someone's reported it...

~~~
smonte
One more error to be reported in Danny Tuppeny's post from today
[http://blog.dantup.com/2016/04/have-software-developers-
give...](http://blog.dantup.com/2016/04/have-software-developers-given-up/)

------
jank66
6,6 Mio open issues created by GoogleCodeExporter.
[https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+author%3AGo...](https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+author%3AGoogleCodeExporter)

~~~
nightpool
Wow, that's kinda crazy. Maybe the title should be "over half of open issues
on Github created by GoogleCodeExporter" :P

~~~
BtM909
It makes sense that this will only grow if people will export their (remote)
repositories to Github. ;-)

------
butu5
Even though there are several open issues in github, how can someone with
little development experience or newbie can start contributing.

On asking this question, many may suggest that first we should use the
particular piece of code in own project and contribute on that project by
raising issues or fixing them. As a beginner, people may start using very
popular frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Node.js. Considering it's complexity
or maturity, it's extremely difficult if not impossible to start contributing.

I am thinking, somewhere down the line, there is some form of hand holding or
mentor ship needed. Where mentor give small task, help in giving some tips or
advice, review the first pull request etc. This will definitely boost
contribution to opensource projects.

There may be several people providing mentor ship. But I feel it's not
structured, how a newbie knows there exist someone who is willing to help.
Only way I can think of now is to spam lot of people randomly by looking at
their github profiles.

Please suggest how to encouraging new developer to contribute more to
opensource and help closing the open issues.

~~~
50CNT
Django has a django-core-mentorship mailing list[0] for people interested in
starting to contribute, a guide on contributing[1] and a selection of issues
tagged as easy-pickings[2] that are suitable for beginners to work on.

I haven't personally tried it, but I did think it was cool when I stumbled
over it.

[0][[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/mailing-
list...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/mailing-
lists/#django-core-mentorship)]
[1][[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing/)]
[2][[https://code.djangoproject.com/query?status=!closed&easy=1](https://code.djangoproject.com/query?status=!closed&easy=1)]

~~~
jsmeaton
I don't think that list is very active unfortunately. Also the easy pickings
list has been mostly completed which doesn't leave a whole lot of room for
newbies to contribute.

Funnily enough, having Tim (a paid contributor, also Core dev) do so much of
the community work means there is less low hanging fruit for new contributors
to get stuck in to.

------
johndoe90
I wonder if one day GitHub will announce the World's Issue Closing Day. The
day every programmer will try hard to close their issues. Though, isn't it
what we do every day?

~~~
labster
GitHub didn't announce it, but I'm a fan of Bit Rot Thursday:
[http://blogs.perl.org/users/zoffix_znet/2016/01/bit-rot-
thur...](http://blogs.perl.org/users/zoffix_znet/2016/01/bit-rot-
thursday.html)

~~~
pavel_lishin
Tech Debt Thursday would be a little more alliterative.

~~~
labster
/t/, /d/, and /θ/ are all pretty close, but I've never thought of it as
alliteration. But I suppose it does count. Thanks for expanding my literary
toolbox.

------
daw___
55,272 of those are marked as "help wanted" \-- feeling bored?

[https://github.com/issues?utf8=&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label...](https://github.com/issues?utf8=&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A"help+wanted")

~~~
pavel_lishin
Can this be filtered by primary project language? I'm not going to be much
help to anyone whose project is mostly C or Ruby.

~~~
r3bl
Just add something like language:Python and you're good to go. :)

------
kristopolous
Hah, after this commit, it'll make it 11,995,199 baby!

~~~
Frenchgeek
Until someone smarter than you discover it actually make it 11,995,205 at
least...

~~~
sleepychu
They could be closing an issue.

~~~
mryan
I think Frenchgeek's joke was that closing one issue can introduce new bugs,
resulting in a net increase of issues.

------
M4v3R
It has even more (20M) closed issues, which is a sign that on average the OS
community is healthy and active :).

~~~
ptman
"Closed, works for me"

~~~
ashmud
Even worse: Simply, "Closed." No reason given. Had to hop on IRC dev channel
to find out.

------
kek918
For a second there I thought GitHub itself had 12 million internal issues

------
schneems
A bit late to the party. I find that many maintainers are left with a mountain
of issues and very few eyeballs to help process them. I made a tool that helps
others get involved with your open source projects to, hopefully, help keep
your issue count manageable. Check it out:
[https://www.codetriage.com](https://www.codetriage.com)

------
jbergknoff
Why is the default issue filter "is:open"? When I have an issue with a
project, I never want to restrict focus to open issues. In fact, I'd much
rather land on a closed issue where it turns out the issue was recently fixed,
or there is a workaround, a better approach, etc.

------
jhgg
Interestingly enough, when refreshing the count of closed varies wildly, and
when looking at closed issues, the count of open varies wildly +/\- a few
million. I wonder what causes that.

~~~
aiiane
My guess? They're giving an estimation based on talking to a few shards of a
much larger sharded system rather than trying to actually get canonical
results for every shard - since it's unlikely that you need a precise count
across that many repositories (which would be really expensive to calculate in
real time).

------
ryanlol
404 already

Edit: not sure what makes this comment so controversial (at least 5 downvotes
already) , the link does indeed 404 if you aren't logged in.

~~~
sachkris
It is not 404. You need to log in.

~~~
Washuu
That is a terrible design by them. It should be 403 Forbidden.

~~~
shangxiao
It's a pattern to prevent information leakage

~~~
Washuu
I assume to prevent exposing the names of private repositories, correct? For
the main(global) search page it would seem reasonable easy to just omit that
from the search results.

~~~
stephengillie
This way it can't be brute-scraped either.

------
anonfunction
This is a nice query[1] to view all open issues for your org's private repos:

[https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+is%3Aprivat...](https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+is%3Aprivate)

------
aurelien
I love github ... but sometimes it also contains incredible idiocy stuff: The
most commented stuff of nothing! +16000 comment of wind ->
[https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+sort%3Acomm...](https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+sort%3Acomments-
desc)
[https://github.com/peej/to.uri.st/issues/128](https://github.com/peej/to.uri.st/issues/128)

------
stephengillie
This number sounds like the number of unread emails in some inboxes. Some have
embraced Inbox Zero - is there a similar movement for issues, something like
"Bug Zero"?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I've had a policy of no known bugs for a long time, no matter how trivial they
are. I'm lucky though in that I don't have a manager sitting over me measuring
my rate of feature creation.

------
jimmytidey
So if creating Wikipedia took 100 million hours, closing the worlds GitHub
issues might be a task about one order of magnitude smaller than creating
Wikipedia...

~~~
tommorris
Once done with that, Wikipedia kinda has a backlog too...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Backlog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Backlog)

------
anrao_arao
[https://github.com/wting/autojump/issues/353](https://github.com/wting/autojump/issues/353)
\- Yay I'm mentioned in one of the github open issues (Which actually isn't a
issue anymore). Wonder how many such open issues are present, which are worth
closing!

------
nikolay
So, roughly a third of all issues are open. I think it would be nice if GitHub
create a daily/weekly/monthly/annual "State of the Hub" kind of analysis for
the entire ecosystem with drill downs and stuff.

------
tonyedgecombe
20,928,924 closed so we must be doing something right.

------
yev
Interesting to see that whenever one refreshes the page - the number changes.

Curious to see issue-per-minute value :D

------
dragthor
I wonder what the percentage is for "actual" issues?

I see a lot of support & pilot error questions.

------
babo
Pretty misleading title, all open Github projects has that many issues
altogether.

------
musicalentropy
I love this one : "question1-what did you do in the past two years?"

------
smpetrey
On the other hand there's approximately 21 Million Closed Issues.

------
tbolt
Got 11,995,200 problems but a repo aint one

------
therealmarv
Github itself has not that much open issues (nobody would use it) ;)

------
striking
You can only see the first 400 pages, unfortunately :(

~~~
chrisfosterelli
I find it particularly odd how the number of results in the top right corner
changes depending on what page you're on, as well.

------
diimdeep
And it's growing

------
floordaemon
There is nothing at the URL specified. Its 404.

What did we miss?

------
githubSearchSUK
It's a SHAME Github is trying to protect its search _results_.

I am often left in front of this situation when hunting for code using
advanced search parameters -- they are preventing people from searching
efficiently.

Does anyone know what is their motivation behind this?

~~~
holman
Not really sure what you're getting at, but I'm assuming you mean searching
for specific syntax or language aspects.

GitHub's definitely not "protecting" shit; it's just that search is a hard
problem, and searching code is a really hard problem, at least at the scale
they're at. They're running one of the largest Elasticsearch clusters in the
world, and a lot of significant things in code are stop words (or not words at
all) in most search databases. Not to mention you need to invalidate entire
repo indexes when you force push, etc. It just takes a lot of resources, and
like anything, will get better over time.

~~~
githubSearchSUK
I was under the impression that since the page returned 404 after being posted
here, they removed the ability to search using these filters, at the very
broad range it was used at.

Now the page is back and I'm not sure what to make of it.

