Why users should not create issues directly

[purpleidea]

Users are asked to not create issues directly in this repository - we ask that you create a GitHub Discussion first.

Like some other projects, mgmt is moving to avoid the use of the issue tracker for discussion or feature requests. Instead, we use GitHub discussions for that. Once a discussion reaches a point where a well-understood, actionable item is identified, it is moved to the issue tracker. This pattern makes it easier for maintainers or contributors to find issues to work on since every issue is ready to be worked on. For general discussion, technical questions, and community engagement, we prefer to do that in the #mgmtconfig channel on matrix.

This approach is based on years of experience maintaining open source projects and observing that 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves. For what's left, the majority are often feature requests (unimplemented features) and not bugs (malfunctioning features). Of the features requests, almost all are underspecified and require more guidance by a maintainer to be worked on.

Any discussion which clearly identifies a problem in mgmt and can be confirmed or reproduced will be converted to an issue by a maintainer, so as a user finding a valid problem you don't do any extra work anyway. Thank you.

(This approach is based on the idea from Mitchellh.)

[purpleidea]

PS: I've decided to try out this approach. If it looks like it's not working or annoying everyone, then we can revisit. I would like to get us to a scenario where the issues list is all stuff that someone could tackle. I've noticed a lot of users browse that looking for patches to write.