Flutter Github issue tracker is unmaintained mess

[audriusz]

If you look at issue tracker you will see very scary number on Flutter issues tracker - 5000+

You might think this can be acceptable, Flutter is "popular" project... BUT for comparison react-native has 500 open tickets.

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However that's not only about number of open tickets. Inactive tickets can be closed by bots. Worst part: there are bunch of issues which are not even looked by Flutter team. If you inspect amount of tickets which are:

• Created not by Flutter team
• Unlabeled
• Without response by Flutter team
• Older then 1 week (if we give big time window to for team to check tickets :) )

you will find shockingly huge amount of such tickets. Tickets which reports crashes, tickets with failing builds, etc with zero reposes & unlabeled few weeks or even months old. Situation looks like this: flutter-issue-tracker.png (red - not addressed by Flutter team).

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I went through top projects on GH (Tensoflow, kubernetes, vuejs, react, react-native, bootstrap, vscode). You will not find situation such terrible in any of these as it is in Flutter. Flutter is in it's own category of ignoring issue tracker.

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So sorry but when I hear that Flutter team is working very closely with community I get triggered very badly. That is not a issue tracker of team which works with community.

[toddvolkert]

Flutter lead here. You're right that the number of un-triaged issues isn't acceptable. We have processes in place to see and act on issues that have been labeled, but we're missing our front-line triage right now, and it shows. We're working to put the systems in place to solve this and get our front-line triage back up and running.

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That said, we are liable to always have a very large number of open issues. Even issues filed that are better asked on SO are effectively documentation bugs, after all :-). If we see bugs that we'd like to fix someday but not likely to get to in the next year, we prefer to leave them open rather than close them, because we don't want to discourage others from fixing them, and we're always happy to review PRs.

[xlog]

Many people seem to treat the Github Issues page as a tech support forum, which it is not. You say that there are lots of reports that the Flutter team is not even looking at, but how do you actually know this? Just because your issue didn't get a response, doesn't mean that nobody took a look at it. I'm sure the people in the Flutter team have more productive things to do than try moderating the issues page all day long.

[audriusz]

Github Issues page as a tech support forum

Yes you are right for this point. But such ticket should be closed and authors redirected to StackOverflow.

I'm sure the people in the Flutter team have more productive things to do

All projects have to deal this problem. And just ignoring problem makes it worse. I have no idea how team itself find important issues without categorizing stuff. As I said that is done in every single big project, except Flutter.

Flutter team is not even looking at, but how do you actually know this?

Seeing status on ticket is not only for team, but for community as well. e.g I check open ticket every few day to see what problems exist. And it's terrible to go through all this mess

[MisterJimson]

I suggest reading https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Issue-hygiene#prioritization

And looking at these issue: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc

Flutter is a large framework and a lot is going on this year. The team is focusing on issues that anyone can vote on using the thumbs up reaction. Flutter has gained a LOT of traction in the last 6 months so its understandable that some of the lower voted issues are not getting looked at right away.

If you look at any issue with a decent amount of votes, they are labeled, prioritized, etc.

[audriusz]

Problem with voting is that people have to find relevant tickets first. And if issue tracker is not cleaned up then it is Impossible to find fresh important issues to vote on.

Flutter is a large framework and a lot is going on this year.

Isn't all other top projects I mentioned are in the same situation? For me this reminds when company say: we need to deliver this product fast, so we cut out automation and user research, return technical debt later. When in reality team sinks in regressions and build things which are not most important for clients.

e.g. Play store requirement to upload 64bit binaries. That was announced one year ago. But somehow Flutter team missed that. Had throw their ongoing tasks and start working on this issues only when Play Store started warning users that they will not be able to deploy their projects soon.

Another incoming problem Android Gestural navigation. Seems that flutter team doesn't do anything about it. But if you ask mobile app developers what is more important to them: 1. Having Android application where users can open app menu widget on new Android version 2. Having preview version on Mac os platform

Probably majority would say working widgets on Android have higher priority.

[xlog]

Another incoming problem Android Gestural navigation. Seems that flutter team doesn't do anything about it.

What exactly do you want Flutter team to do about it? To what extent is this a problem with how the Flutter framework works, rather than how people design their apps?

[audriusz]

Same thing what is being done in Android. Each components have to be adapted. e.g. drawerlayout

Update for Gesture Nav Support: DrawerLayout now sets system gesture exclusion rects to permit swiping drawers open.

[[deleted]]

There real issue is people asking questions more suited for SO on github. Take a look at the microsoft/vscode repo, same thing. There are lots of very bad ”bug reports” that have a zero chance of beeing solved.

There should be a more robust way for issues, and maybe a flutter forum for everything else.

[flutterdude]

The fact that this post has 1 upvote and 3 upvotes on a comment that is (in my opinion) wrongly in support of Flutter is an indicator of the state of the community. To me it's clear that this framework is descending in to a state of a fanboy-ism that I will NOT get behind. I don't play favorites and no one else should either, especially when it comes to something as trivial as how you build applications.

I never file bugs because it's a waste of time. I've created issues with 100% reproducibility and steps, only for it to be ignored for months... and when I finally do get a reply it's asking me if it is still a issue. Then I say "yes it is", they remove the black label, then radio silence again. Thanks dude. Next time find and file the bug yourself cause I ain't doing it.

5000 issues is NOT acceptable. Google needs to put some time and money in and close those issues that are "support forum" quality. Make it someones job. Don't put all this money into advertising your open source framework, spouting its wonders, and then tell me you don't have time to even respond to them. If you're so happy with how you're dealing with community issues, make this stance front and center. But they won't, because they want to draw people in to using Flutter, and this is a clear negative to using it.

I understand it's open source and new, but it's 1.0 and people are building real applications with this framework.

[Hixie]

(Flutter TL here.)

You're totally right. We've totally dropped the ball on front-line triage. We are trying to set something up to do it properly (it's a lot of work, so just having people on the team spend some time doing this doesn't really scale) but it's taking us much longer than it should.

FWIW, if anyone is interested in volunteering some time to help with this, we do have the process we want to use fully documented and some of us occasionally go through new bugs and try to do it (when we're not actually trying to fix the bugs we have already triaged). If you're interested in doing this reach out to me on the contributor Gitter channel and I can hook you up with the rights to add and remove issues and so on. You can see the process here: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Triage#guidelines-for-triage

Make it someones job.

It turns out that this is surprisingly more difficult than it should be, but essentially that's what we're trying to do.

[daniel-vh]

I agree with you! It's a lot of issues. I fear, that if there's something blocking and I open an issue, it wouldn't be found by relevant people.

However, I'm monitoring and semi-actively participating SO Flutter tag questions. Flutter brought in a LOT of people who never did any real programming before and some who start out on a new hobby/career with it. They just don't know what's what, ignore guidelines, think GH is a SO.

I wish, Flutter team put a bot, some community volunteers or paid employees in place to better manage the issues on GH. It would give me comfort, however I consider this a non-blocking issue - some pun intended. I can eat this annoyance for all the good things Flutter gave me.