Jenkins is a large open source project. Well over two thousand repositories, almost two thousand committers, four or five GitHub Organizations, and many thousands of opened, in progress, and closed issues. Part of the reason we’re called Jenkins is because of GitHub and yet many of our repositories do not use GitHub Issues. We eschew GitHub Issues in favor of Jira for a number of reasons, perhaps most importantly is that GitHub Issues are incredibly difficult to scale across repositories and teams. What might be considered a shining example of scaling GitHub Issues would be the Kubernetes ecosystem which has concocted a rather complex workflow using automated bots, labels, and comments on Issues. As such, it’s not impossible, but vanilla out-of-the-box GitHub Issues are tricky to grow with large free and open source projects.
As Jenkins has matured, my own opinions on the time and place for GitHub Issues has evolved. Unlike the uncompromising opinion that we should simply disable Issues on our repositories, like we tend to do with Wiki and Projects, which I do genuinely find mostly useless even for my personal projects, I have started to think that Issues should be left enabled by default, even if the “main development” of tickets is handled elsewhere. As a maintainer it’s not terribly difficult, and dare I say automatable, to triage and move tickets from GitHub Issues into Jira. What is not automatable is getting the issues filed in the first place by new users and contributors.
Stated simply, the barrier to entry of GitHub Issues is so low that I would rather have redundant tickets in two systems than to leave potential bug reports with no place to go. With newer tools like Probot I believe the opportunities for exfiltrating information from GitHub into a better system of record, such as Jira, is so much more attainable than it once was.
Should you find yourself worried about drowning in the torrent of GitHub Issues, I will refer you to The Art of Closing. You needn’t spend too much time in GitHub Issues, and you don’t owe anybody any more time than you want to spend on Issues; practice good hygiene and close unnecessary Issues early and often!
That said, I suggest erring on the side of enabling easier feedback than not. Filing Issues is typically the first step on the road to contribution.