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What sucks about GitHub projects? Phrased differently, what would a contender you’d like to use do better?

• SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  Not OP but also using GitHub Projects. Up until recently projects was just missing critical features like true epics and first class parent child relationships between issues. These are slowly getting added though. There is an entire product called Zenhub that exists to make GitHub issue tracking more sane. I will say the automation story in GitHub Projects is better than Jira imo
  • igetspam 3y ago
    I'd say the automation is better but more complicated. I feel bad for ZenHub. The new GitHub Projects is good enough that you can stop using ZenHub and not miss much. I think GitHub just killed their business. I love they cross project status automation they built. That's one of their killer features.
    • numbsafari 3y ago
      > better but more complicated Completely agree. Using GH actions for this is really verbose and clunky, and makes you rely on too many third-parties.
      • SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
        They actually have a light wrapper on GitHub actions in the projects view now that may replace a lot of the really common actions. It’s GUI based and right now it can only do very simple things but I could see it being the new way for less techy people to put basic automation in
        • numbsafari 3y ago
          “Only do simple things”. It’s basically useless given how little it can do.
          • numbsafari 3y ago
            Thinking about this a bit more (can’t edit above, so replying to myself). The other annoying thing about the “simple” method is that it’s also outside of your repo. So that configuration isn’t versioned, it isn’t really present anywhere. Your actions code, clunky as it is, is still code. Simple and code-driven shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.
• igetspam 3y ago
  One of the things we struggle with is cross repo consistency. Take something like labels. They apply at the repo level and not the project level, so when you add issues from multiple repos, managing labels becomes an administrative task. View creation is confusing and painful, due to the flexibility (which used to be a common complaint about Jira until they removed the many hundreds of options). People struggle to understand what comma does in the label list vs a space with a new label key/value. Workflows are also per project and have to be replicated for every project and there's no global default template you can define. Dependencies are non existent, so order of operations can't be defined in a way that's meaningful. You can order tasks but not indicate "dependency a is not complete and you may move on" in a simple way. Task lists can't be reordered without editing the markup, which is finicky. If there's a newline it doesn't like, it errors. If there's a character wrong, it errors. Sometimes it just errors and you have to delete the whole thing and recreate it from scratch for it to render again. There's no "move to top" or "move to bottom," which is necessary when you have long lista of items. It's improving and if everything is a code, it's probably fine but when you're doing projects, some things are just tasks and it's not well suited for that, in my opinion. I'm sure it will improve (as of last week you can limit WIP and export views as a CSV) but it feels so much like it's catching up, slowly, that I don't see it ever becoming a "good" alternative to systems that already exist. I could list more but I'd have to look at my computer and there is already enough here that I'm just pulling from memory.
  • numbsafari 3y ago
    You covered most of my complaints. It’s really, really bad, and the pace of progress is really slow. Have Microsoft arrived at the Extinguish phase of their GitHub plan? Our sales rep has been pushing hard on various Azure upsells and cross sells.
    • martin8412 3y ago
      It's sure feels like it. The responsiveness of GitHub has gotten horrible.