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Comment by mannycalavera | Hacker News Reader

I've been keeping my eye on Crystal for a while now thinking about making the plunge and writing something production ready in it.

But I'm a bit vary as for the casual observer the Crystal project github (https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal) seems brim with unsolved issues (over 500 issues!) and stale PR-s (over 105!). I'm not sure if this is a sign of poor project managment, development stall or poor community engagement but still it leaves a bad first impression. Contrast this to elixir project page (https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir).

Maybe someone who is actively involved in the development of Crystal could shine a light?

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The number of open issues is a bad correlation for how well a project is managed: rust has nearly 4000 open issues. Most of these are either feature requests we'll get to some day, or minor bugs. Crystal development is proceding nicely and we will have two developers (bcardiff and me) working full-time on crystal this summer.

That's great and thank you for responding! I agree that the number of open issues is not a good indicator of project management. I was more worried about PRs being open in 2016, 2017 and still lingering - this in connection with a large number of open issues seemed like a possible red flag. But it may be just an issue of triage.

Keep up the good work!

Every project has it's warts, long running feature requests, and it's bugs so minor nobody's gotten around to fixing them.

Some projects decide to hide those by closing the issues, we generally keep them open, because they are still valid issues.

And I think this is a good sign of a projects positive health ^

I for one have found the crystal community to be very responsive to the issues I have reported. I'd rather have a project leave 500 issues open than just close everything in sight like many large projects do.

>I'm not sure if this is a sign of poor project managment, development stall or poor community engagement

You missed another possibility: it being perfectly normal.

If you check any large-ish project you'll find 100s or 1000s of unsolved issues and stale PRs.

And I'm talking about seasoned, used in production, products, from MySQL to Chromium and whatever...

I think issues left open > 12 months is antithetical to the idea of lean/agile and could be a sign of suboptimal project management.

But don’t get me wrong, I <3 Ruby and am excited about Crystal.

>issues left open > 12 months is anti-thetical to the idea of lean/agile

OSS doesn't care about lean/agile, those are ideologies consultants sell to enterprises.

Things are done when they are done.

> I think issues left open > 12 months is antithetical to the idea of lean/agile and could be a sign of suboptimal project management.

Totally depends on the nature of the project, its policies and users.

Any popular FOSS project that allows anyone to post a bug, and doesn't just close unattended bug reports (which is bad imho), is likely to end up with some (usually minor) bugs open over 12 or more months.

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