Ticketing / workflow / bugtracker systems are always nasty. Github’s is pretty good. Maybe the best of what’s out there. But it ain’t perfect.

Here’s what I like:

• It’s ready to go immediately once you start your github repo.
• You can link a commit to an issue by mentioning the issue number in the commit.
• Labels let you store a TON of metadata.

And what I dislike:

• No obvious way to tell if somebody is actively working on an issue. More generally, no “status” field exists on an issue.
• No obvious way to do a query like “label X or label Y”.
• No command-line interface.
• Since github doesn’t include a built-in mailing list, github issues often get used for support requests. Then when somebody explains “here’s how to do … “, the issue gets closed, and that helpful expensive-to-write documentation is hidden away. The solution here is for github to host a mailing list for every repository.