Expound on issue tracking guidelines

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Andrew David Wong 2021-05-23 21:57:50 -07:00
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@ -49,6 +49,12 @@ It is not a place for discussion.
If you wish to discuss something in the issue tracker, please do so on the forum or mailing lists (see [Help, Support, Mailing Lists, and Forum](/support/)).
You can simply link to the relevant issue in your discussion post.
This guideline is important for keeping issues focused on *actionable information*, which helps the develpers to stay focused on their work.
When developers come back to an issue to work on it, we do not want them to have to sift through a large number of unnecessary comments before they can get started.
In many cases, an issue that gets "too big" essentially becomes more trouble than it's worth, and no developer will touch it (also see [every issue must be about a single, actionable thing](#every-issue-must-be-about-a-single-actionable-thing)).
In these cases, we sometimes have to close the issue and open a new one.
This is a waste of energy for everyone involved, so we ask that everyone help to avoid repeating this pattern.
### Do not submit questions ###
[qubes-issues](https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues) is not the place to ask questions.
@ -60,6 +66,12 @@ By contrast, [qubes-issues](https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues) is m
If your issue is not actionable, please see [Help, Support, Mailing Lists, and Forum](/support/) for the appropriate place to post it.
If your issue would be about more than one thing, file them as separate issues instead.
This means we should generally not try to use a single issue as a "meta" or "epic" issue that exists only to group, contain, or track other issues.
Instead, when there is a need to group multiple related issues together, use [projects](https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/projects).
This guideline is extremely important for making the issue tracker a useful tool for the developers.
When an issue is too big and composite, it becomes intractable and drastically increases the likelihood that nothing will get done.
Such issues also tend to encourage an excessive amount of general discussion that is simply not appropriate for a technical issue tracker (see [the issue tracker is not a discussion forum](#the-issue-tracker-is-not-a-discussion-forum)).
### New issues should not be duplicates of existing issues ###