GitHub: Reorder issues in a milestone | Hacker News Reader

GitHub: Reorder issues in a milestone

github.com

82 pointsOompa29 comments

Sorry, but it almost seems like some weird variation of Stockholm Syndrome that people get excited about this. It is a trivial feature that should have already been there, and was actually there over 5 years ago before they removed it. If you want to feature compare, Issues is still way behind what various other issue trackers had many years ago.

What kind of features are missing, compared to other issue trackers you like?

Although I'm not OP, I use Phabricator (https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/) at work and I absolutely love it. It's much better than Github for our use case, as it has subtasks, task merging, priorities, Kanban workboards etc. Tasks can block another task (for instance, the "Implement OAuth2" task can block the "Build a private API" task). You can flag objects for later and set specific privacy rules for every task (for instance, you can hide a security bug from the public until it's fixed). It's all tightly integrated with other Phabricator apps, which is a plus. Also, it's open source.

GitHub does sort of have subtasks. If you use checkboxes like so:

- [x] The root url displays a page

- [ ] Users can sign up, sign in, register

GitHub will display the progress on the issue (when you're looking at the list of issues) as 1 of 2.

Can you have several levels?

Unrelated feature request (because I bet people from GitHub are reading this thread): I'd love to be able to create gists under an organization account rather than attached to my personal profile (and hence only visible to members of that organization).

You may consider to create an issue in one of these repos (or both):

- https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues

- https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues

Thanks for the request! A few of our customers have asked for the same thing, so it's in our list of feedback items and being tracked.

Great idea for keeping little company scripts, style guide snippets etc.

This a thousand time !

I'm amazed that a trivial feature addition like this can make the front page of HN.

GitHub may not be perfect, but they are clearly doing something right to win (or re-win?) the affection of the community.

I'm not sure if this is really a good thing. Possibly people are happy that some really annoying problem finally got fixed, rather than celebrate the feature itself. "GitHub stopped killing puppies" would also likely make a front page.

Some people can't make the front with a webapp that takes 3 months to create.

Github gets on the front with re-ordering issues ;)

The letter that the group of developers wrote a few months ago must have scared them, because they have been adding quite a few features compared to what they did the previous couple of years.

It inspires one to wonder... what were they doing before that? Alternatively, perhaps they just hired a bunch of new people right then?

Just writing checks for friends and family.

Business stuff

This is great. I thought this would be a useful feature at one point, and then just figured it would probably never happen.

Funny how any stream of notifications just turns into a todo list though. I wish I could just pipe them all to one place and have the changes actually committed back to the source. It'd be great to collaborate where some people use Asana, some people use Trello, and some people just use textfiles but they're all in sync and it doesn't matter where or how you make edits.

> I thought this would be a useful feature at one point

You used to be able to do this ages ago. Reordering was one of the features that "no one used" and didn't make the cut when they rewrote "Issues 2.0" five years ago:

https://github.com/blog/831-issues-2-0-the-next-generation

I love a lot of the changes github has been making. One sorely needed thing they've recently added is ability to assign issues to more than one person.

The one thing I am dying for is the ability to mark notifications unread. Notifications are a wonderful interface to catch up on things where you're mentioned or needed, but there is no way to mark them as unread, so you have to deal with them right that second.

I agree on having a need for that feature myself too. In GitLab we solved it by not marking TODO's when you read them but only when you take action. The problem has been when you don't want to do anything (reply, comment, vote, etc.). That is why we just added the ability to mark TODO's as read in GitLab in 8.9 https://about.gitlab.com/2016/06/22/gitlab-8-9-released/ section "Manually add Todos" (you can mark them done in the same spot.

BTW We're working on ordering issues as part of an issue board https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/17907

I'm happy they added back this feature.

Can someone from GitHub explain why they removed it a few years ago [1], and why they changed their mind and added it back today?

[1] https://github.com/blog/831-issues-2-0-the-next-generation

The rationale I heard back then was "no one used it". My guess is that these days, even if "no one" means "less than 1% of users" it still amounts to hundreds of thousands of people.

Can some of the people who upvoted this explain why is this relevant?

Because a lot of people use github issues and milestones as a way to gauge what is needed to be done for what release, and the ability to order by priority is a great option.

You may think it's trivial and doesn't deserve the front page, but many people do. Clearly.

The main issue I had with milestones is that you could not rename them. Have they fixed that one too?

Yes you can rename milestones.

Cheers. Unfortunately it seems that the milestone name and link where they are assigned in the issue still doesn't. So you get "[user] added this to the [old_milestone_name] milestone on [date]" and then clicking it returns no issues.

Why not a general priority system? Why only for a milestone?

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