> It seems like the problem you are trying to solve is potential users quickly dismissing projects with too many open issues.
No. The issue I am talking about is that there is no clear separation between things which must be addressed (bugs) and things which don't (feature requests). There is no possible way I could have made that more clear. I have repeated this in almost every comment on this topic. You seem to be intentionally misunderstanding me at this point.
Owners of a project have the ability to create clear separations between categories if they want. The 'issues with labels' structure allows each project to setup the categories and level of separation that matches their need. This is important because of the following:
The distinction between "things which must be addressed" and "things which don't" doesn't map cleanly onto the distinction between "bug report" and "feature request" and there are also issues that don't fall cleanly into either category.
Examples:
1) A user opens an issues because a library doesn't work properly on platform X and fails with an error message. The developer of that library closes that issue with a "won't fix" because they don't support the platform. Is this a bug report or a feature request?
2) A user opens an issues because one of the dependencies of a library is no longer being developed so won't support moving to the new version of the language the library is written in. Is this a bug report or a feature request?
3) A project owner opens an issue because a new standard has been released that the library has to support because it is critical to it's ability to interoperate with other parts of the software ecosystem. This could well be much higher priority than many minor edge-case bugs, but is still new functionality.
The answers to these questions can, and should, vary from project to project and issue to issue depending on the larger context. An issue tracking system should be flexible enough to encompass these different needs.
I charitably assumed you were focused on "potential users quickly dismissing projects with too many open issues" since that at least provides a clear reason for why the current methods of categorizing issues isn't good. Since that assumption was incorrect, I still don't understand exactly what exactly your issue is with github issues.
I'm bringing up issues that have to be considered when creating an issue tracking system that serves the needs of a wide range of projects. You can choose to ignore those issues, but that doesn't mean they don't matter.
You've repeatedly conflated categorization of issues based on priority and categorization of issues based on relation to the spec. Just because something is a bug report doesn't mean it needs to be fixed and just because something is a new feature doesn't mean that it shouldn't prioritized over bugs. Ignoring this simply serves to keep the conversation running in circles.
No. The issue I am talking about is that there is no clear separation between things which must be addressed (bugs) and things which don't (feature requests). There is no possible way I could have made that more clear. I have repeated this in almost every comment on this topic. You seem to be intentionally misunderstanding me at this point.