5 steps for tackling bugs and fixes for an open source project

The very first thing your project needs to do is to figure out what issues are supposed to be for. Each project is different. For example, in Rails, we keep issues strictly for bugs only. Help questions go to Stack Overflow, and new feature discussion and requests go to the rails-core mailing list. For Rust, we have issues for feature requests, meta-issues… everything. For some repositories, closing all of the issues is not feasible, and for others, you’re shooting for zero. (If you don’t believe that this is even possible, check out Sequel. Issues are rarely even open for more than a few days!)