> While I feel bad that you had people treat you without respect, I don't think turning issues off is a sign of a serious project that should be used by many people in production (even if the project itself is nearly a work of art).
For some people, this is a good thing.
> You don't have to resolve all open issues but closing an issue tracker the outright signals "I don't care if you have problems and I do not intend for this software to be maintained in any sense of collaborative fashion here on Github". Above all, such behaviour signals to me that there is only 1 person making commits / merging PRs and they are kind of tired of OSS (which is fine, by the way).
I think it's more nuanced than that. It's perhaps more "I care if you have problems only if you have put in the effort to try and fix them. Then we can work together on getting it fixed for everyone".
"Issues closed, PRs welcome" is a perfectly reasonable way to run a healthy project.
Most projects on GitHub don't have a mailing list. Turning off issues makes it hard to tell if a project is in good shape. It prevents users who have relevant knowledge from helping users who don't.
Solving a problem together means agreeing on the problem and the solution before someone spends days working on it.
It's a trade-off, for sure. But it's on the project owner to make that call. It's not always the case that one model is best for any given project/maintainer/set of users.
As for project health, I treat the git log as a far more reliable indicator than the issues list. That shows me what's actually getting done.
For some people, this is a good thing.
> You don't have to resolve all open issues but closing an issue tracker the outright signals "I don't care if you have problems and I do not intend for this software to be maintained in any sense of collaborative fashion here on Github". Above all, such behaviour signals to me that there is only 1 person making commits / merging PRs and they are kind of tired of OSS (which is fine, by the way).
I think it's more nuanced than that. It's perhaps more "I care if you have problems only if you have put in the effort to try and fix them. Then we can work together on getting it fixed for everyone".
"Issues closed, PRs welcome" is a perfectly reasonable way to run a healthy project.