Disable repository-wide issue templates.

[ryzhyk]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Github automatically applies issue templates from https://github.com/vmware/.github/ to all projects under the VMware org. This introduces a level or bureaucracy that is not suitable for all projects and that cannot be easily opted out of (to the best of my knowledge).

Describe the solution you'd like

Issue templates are useful in large projects with many external contributors in order to help streamline bug diagnostics and reduce the load on maintainers. However, such projects use highly customized templates designed to capture project-specific information. For a smaller project like ours, I prefer to make it as easy as possible for people to send their questions, requests, and bug reports by not imposing any structure. Speaking from personal experience, even a relatively simple form introduces an unnecessary barrier. And if the form has mandatory fields, I start to feel like it's the tax season :)

While github does allow us to override the set of templates per repo, I don't see a way to disable templates altogether once they are enabled for the org.

I would like to ask the maintainers of the vmware org to please reconsider the use of issue templates. Folks who want to use templates for their repos can add them with two clicks.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[ryzhyk]

cc @mbudiu-vmw

[mihaibudiu]

I would just override them

[ryzhyk]

I want to disable templates altogether, not override them with different templates.

[ericwb]

We added the templates to encourage good open source community practice. Templates avoid an all too frequent issue of receiving issues with little to no information (think one liner bug reports). The other advantage the template will provide is automatic assigning a label to distinguish between a feature and bug. Saves a little effort on triaging.

We only recently introduced this and could remove. One question, are you seeking everything to be removed or just the template within the bug/feature? Is labeling still beneficial?

[ryzhyk]

@ericwb , thanks for considering my request! I understand the intention, and perhaps a case can be made that this is a reasonable default. My problem is that this is a default that one cannot opt out of: once the org uses templates, all repositories under the org must use issue templates. So my preference would be to remove templates altogether.

[warthog9]

So the easiest way to override the organization defaults (by github logic anyway) is to have your own versions locally. Upside: you can have a local non-template template. More or less if you mimic the 3 files in the organization template but leave them (mostly) blank / empty they'll properly override the organization ones the way you'd kind of expect. Leaving these files blank does not work (empty / blank ~= to no file the way github processes it)

Example can be seen here: https://github.com/893da2e4-d8fb-11ea-87d0-0242ac130003/testing-template/tree/main/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE with the 3 files there. The two .yml files throw errors if you look at them, but do the overriding you'd expect.

(in case I delete that / revert the commit / something as that's a toy repo to begin with)
bug-report.yml:
name: 🐛 Bug report
config.yml:
blank_issues_enabled: true
feature-request.yml:
name: 🚀 Feature request

Once those are in the .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE directory of the project, they'll override the organization files and (at least for me) they flipped back to acting as if there was no organization templates in place.

[tenthirtyam]

@chipchilders and @normansden - this should be able to be closed.

Ryan Johnson
Distinguished Engineer, VMware by Broadcom