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> an open-and-shut linked issue is still better than a bug fix with no associated issue at all It sounds like your issue tracker is a part time documentation r

• simonw 4y ago
  > It sounds like your issue tracker is a part time documentation repository. Yeah, it's exactly that. I'm planning to write more about this. Basically I've started thinking of issues as "temporaral documentation" - documentation with an attached timestamp that was known to be accurate only at the point when it was written. A challenge with regular documentation is that when you first write it you are making a commitment to keep it up-to-date in the future. A project with thousands of pages of outdated documentation isn't much better than a project with no documentation at all (it might even be worse). But a project with thousands of pages of timestamped issue comments feels different to me: there's no expectation that those will be updated in the future, but they still offer enormous value in terms of capturing the decisions that lead to the present day. So yes: I do consider my issues as a form of documentation. They're not a replacement for traditional documentation, but they're a valuable extension to it.
  • thunky 4y ago
    That makes sense, although I think I would prefer to put pull requests in the "temporaral documentation" category rather than issues. But it sounds like your process is working well.