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Ask HN: How to say no to a GitHub issue feature request?

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Re: Ask HN: How to say no to a GitHub issue feature request?

#171

Post by phendrenad2 »

Move off of GitHub. It's clear that neither the founders nor the new Microsoft management care about this kind of noxious spam. Or at least, they can't be bothered to give you the tools you need to deal with it (I want to be able to, at my discretion, (1) disable creation of issues and pull requests (2) force an approval process where I must approve issues and PRs before they even appear on the page (3) be able to decline PRs without the original poster or anyone else from getting an alert).

The fact that they won't add these features isn't surprising, GitHub is designed to be a corporate product, for corporate dev teams. That's who pays the bills, not open-source projects which are less obviously a benefit to GitHub (they are, they bring corporate users/payers to the platform).

It's clear you don't want to be confrontational in any way. I understand, it's also not in my nature. You shouldn't be forced to deal with this, yet on GitHub, you will be.

Re: Ask HN: How to say no to a GitHub issue feature request?

#176

Post by Derbasti »

exabrial wrote: post #127

Kindness first, always. Maintaining an OSS project will push your personal growth to a new limit. - be direct: I do not wish to have that feature in the project. - explain: the vision of the project is xyz. This feature you’re requesting does not fit in the vision because abc. I don’t think it belongs here as it will become a maint burden and a distraction from the goal. - encouragement: if you do think you’d find va…

I add that if the request is reasonable, I always ask back for something. Usually for a specific use case with code example, or maybe a prototype implementation.

I only ever actually react if the issuer demonstrates that it is important enough to them to put in some work.

Because 95% don't.

Re: Ask HN: How to say no to a GitHub issue feature request?

#177

Post by sealeck »

"Thank you kindly for your suggestion as to how the project can be advanced in a prosperous manner. At present, the project contributors do not possess the bandwidth and time required to implement this feature. Although it is not a present priority for us, we would welcome a patch implementing this feature."

Re: Ask HN: How to say no to a GitHub issue feature request?

#179

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

This is probably not best practice but I just throw it in the backlog. There's always too much stuff in the backlog. Maybe theoretically someday another dev will write it and submit a PR. Maybe the requester will.

This doesn't apply as well if it's a feature you actively do not want in the product.

Re: Ask HN: How to say no to a GitHub issue feature request?

#180

Post by detaro »

chrsig wrote: post #178

some suggestions: - "pull requests welcome" (This is the polite way to say 'fuck off') - "thanks for sharing your feedback, I don't think this is a feature I'm willing to build or support" - "in order to implement this I would need to be compensated" - "no."

caveat: if you say "pull requests welcome", you should be actually willing to consider and merge a potential pull request. If you don't want the feature at all, be clear about that.
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