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Comment by deepfriedrice | Hacker News Reader

1.1k open issues. OOF

1.1k isn't bad for a project with ~33 million weekly downloads[1], imo. Yes, I know that's not necessarily a good metric, but it's ~10 million more than React[2] which also has a similar number of open issues[3].

[1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/prettier

[2]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react

[3]: https://github.com/facebook/react

A code formatter has no business having 1100 open issues (5k closed). It is not rocket science.

In my experience, the number of open issues not only correlates with popularity, but how crappy the language is. Javascript projects, with its myriad of dependencies and attracting junior, inexperienced devs, tend to accumulate a great number of bugs.

For reference, curl has 24 open issues (4k closed), it is a couple orders of magnitude more complex AND more used than prettier.

I don't know enough about prettier. But in general linters (which have overlap with formatters but aren't the same) have a lot of issues that fall in the "this is not my preference. It must therefore be changed" category.

"Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite." I guess.

Is that because they don’t use a bot to auto-close issues like a lot of other projects?

That annoys the crap out of me. Closing stale issues doesn’t make the issues go away, it just means that edge cases aren’t addressed. If I have an issue and find myself in a stale-closed issue, I’m not even going to bother reporting it. I’m either going to look for a different library altogether, one that actually tries to solve edge cases; or I’m going to create my own library as a big middle-finger to the project. At work, I’ll just open a new issue, which will probably just be ignored.

And arguably we’re where we are because people have this idea that issue counts are comparable between projects.

I see this way of thinking around CVEs too. I think it’s a mistake of making data-driven decisions based on noise rather than signals. It sounds good when you have a comparative number to go on.

I see open issues as a pretty good signal that people are using the software and people care about its development, but maybe the number of contributors is too small. In these cases, I might even open the PR myself. Issues without replies though is probably the worst signal you can send as a maintainer. Closing issues without replying and letting a stale bot passively aggressively close issues is probably tied, but it’s usually hidden away.

Yeah, I stopped reporting issues to projects when I have seen tons of stale bot closed issues. Those were real bugs, still really in the codebase, just no one fixed it for arbitrary short time.

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