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Maybe I'm different, but if the repo has some dozens of issues open, I take it as a sign of health. It means people are using it enough to find problems or ask for more features. If there's no issues, it tends to mean I'm treading on new, untested (or at least less tested) ground.

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A few dozen issues is one thing, but lots of the major OSS projects have thousands of open issues at any given time. If people think that each open issue is an unfixed bug or missing feature, then thousands of issues would mean that the project is at best unreliable and at worst fundamentally broken or dead. Except most of those issues are from users who should be asking questions on stack overflow.

An another OSS author, I am glad that you think that way (and I agree with you) but unfortunately not all users think that way. I have literally heard stories from users who think that my project is unstable because it had a sizable open issues count (~200). They didn't even look at the fact that 1/3rd are feature requests.

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