Jamie Tanna (Jan 07 2026 at 22:46): Jamie Tanna (Jan 07 2026 at 22:46):Ghostty recently was the focus on Hacker News about how they use Discussions for managing user questions/reports, but given they'd taken some inspiration from Renovate, I thought I'd write up some of the things we've learned in the 5 years we've used it: https://www.jvt.me/posts/2026/01/07/renovate-why-discussions/
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jan 08 2026 at 02:03):oh, very nice
and here I am raising a PR without a discussion, haha oops
https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/pull/40264
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jan 08 2026 at 02:23):yeah, I think Discussions was a good addition to GitHub, as many things don't fit the open-then-comment-then-fix-then-close pattern
it's interesting (and maybe even a little confusing to me) that Discussions does have an "answer" feature
Jamie Tanna (Jan 08 2026 at 09:39):Haha it's absolutely fine - I dint think we've had too many we've closed as they've needed discussing (https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/pulls?q=is%3Apr+label%3Aauto%3Adiscussion-first+is%3Aclosed or https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/pulls?q=is%3Apr+label%3Aneeds-discussion+is%3A closed)
Jamie Tanna (Jan 08 2026 at 09:40):We quite like having answer mode on, for our "request help" (but not other types) so it's clear to show what the solution was
Jamie Tanna (Jan 08 2026 at 09:40):Out of interest, what do you find confusing here?
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jan 08 2026 at 21:32):Jamie Tanna said:
Out of interest, what do you find confusing here?
mostly just as a product feature: how did they go from forum to mini-StackOverflow?
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jan 08 2026 at 21:32):I don't hate it or anything, just surprised that it's there
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jan 08 2026 at 21:34):probably my lack of imagination, and thinking Discourse's feature set was the final list for discussions/forums
Matthew Sanabria (Jan 23 2026 at 19:02):I really want to switch to discussions instead of issues but I want GitHub to stop tying Discussions, Issues, etc to a repository.
Matthew Sanabria (Jan 23 2026 at 19:03):I want like an Oxide wide discussions space where users could select some repository or category. I'm getting real tired of switching repositories just to view different issues or discussions.
Matthew Sanabria (Jan 23 2026 at 19:04):Like the model is wrong. I want to view "discussions for the projects I own" rather than "enumerate every project I own and then view discussions separately".
Matthew Sanabria (Jan 23 2026 at 19:05):It becomes a pain when you have multiple related repositories too. Say you have a core plugin plus some UI component in separate repositories. Now you have separate issues and discussions but the projects are part of the same logical component. Sure you can create a monorepo but they really are separate code bases and the same logical concept.
Matthew Sanabria (Jan 23 2026 at 19:06):Anyway. The only thing I'm missing from Discussions is that they aren't easily transferred or sync'd to external systems. If you're a Jira shop or something you can't easily get the data from discussions synthesized into Jira issues.
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jan 23 2026 at 21:43):Matthew Sanabria said:
Like the model is wrong. I want to view "discussions for the projects I own" rather than "enumerate every project I own and then view discussions separately".
sounds like the GitHub solution is to monorepo
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jan 23 2026 at 21:44):Matthew Sanabria said:
Anyway. The only thing I'm missing from Discussions is that they aren't easily transferred or sync'd to external systems. If you're a Jira shop or something you can't easily get the data from discussions synthesized into Jira issues.
yeah, the data model for discussions is not a single thread of comments, so it doesn't map to comments in JIRA or elsewhere
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jan 23 2026 at 22:18):huh, now I'm wondering how industry practices have shifted to better fit GitHub's data model
what would the industry look like if source code hosting had been done differently?
Nabeel S (Jan 24 2026 at 03:28):I really want to switch to discussions instead of issues but I want GitHub to stop tying Discussions, Issues, etc to a repository.
One work around for this is to have a repo that's not dedicated to any one piece of code/project. This one repo has issues and discussions enabled, while all other repos have those features disabled.
Besides being where all issues and discussions happen, the central git repo itself can also act as the main documentation hub. So after a discussion runs its course, someone can distill the conclusions/decisions into documents that are checked into git.
Full disclosure: I work at GItHub.
Nabeel S (Jan 24 2026 at 03:31):(and you can use tags to label individual discussions by repo/project for filtering purposes)
Jamie Tanna (Jan 24 2026 at 11:36):Matthew Sanabria said:
I really want to switch to discussions [...] but I want GitHub to stop tying Discussions, [...] to a repository.
You can have Discussions at an org-level, at least - not the others though
(It'll then put them into a specific repo for storage, but folks can interact with it from the top-level view on an org)
Jamie Tanna (Jan 24 2026 at 11:38):I've written a thing to sync from GitHub Discussions to a local SQLite database, so I can have raw access to all the data, without needing to hit the GitHub APIs for it, and that's worked nicely - would be straightforward to (vibe)code something that syncs to JIRA, but agreed that it's a pain!
I guess not enough orgs use Discussions for it to be a first-class feature, as well as a more graph-based / non-linear flow for Discussions (due to threading)
Matthew Sanabria (Feb 16 2026 at 16:44):Nabeel S said:
I really want to switch to discussions instead of issues but I want GitHub to stop tying Discussions, Issues, etc to a repository.
One work around for this is to have a repo that's not dedicated to any one piece of code/project. This one repo has issues and discussions enabled, while all other repos have those features disabled.
Besides being where all issues and discussions happen, the central git repo itself can also act as the main documentation hub. So after a discussion runs its course, someone can distill the conclusions/decisions into documents that are checked into git.
Full disclosure: I work at GItHub.
Is this one repository meant to be a company wide repository that just holds a GitHub Projects project? It would be better if GitHub decoupled GitHub Projects from a repository and allowed you to make them at the organization level.
Tim Uckun (Feb 16 2026 at 21:30):You guys should look into fossil https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
Seems to be a batteries included SCM which would provide you with all that you are looking for.
Tommy Byrd (Feb 17 2026 at 08:58):Projects are org level. The project items are generally issues/PRs across repos, but you can also make draft issues that only live in the project.
Organization discussions are inherently linked to a dedicated repo, but I think that's mostly because you need a place to configure read/write access and moderation workflows anyway. So the idea is you just delegate a repo to be the place where all that's stored, and then in your org configuration you just pick that repo as the source.
(disclaimer: I also work at GitHub, but not on the product team)
Matthew Sanabria (Feb 17 2026 at 14:22):Ha. I tried all of those already but it's not there yet.
Matthew Sanabria (Feb 17 2026 at 14:23):Draft issues can't have labels. Projects are at the org level but state is stored in the project itself with no ability to have org wide project fields.
Matthew Sanabria (Feb 17 2026 at 14:23):Parent child relationships are 1:1.
Matthew Sanabria (Feb 17 2026 at 14:23):Hopefully it continues to get better but I haven't seen much love on the projects feature in a while and I'm starting to get worried.
Last updated: Feb 17 2026 at 17:33 UTC