Well, that is exactly my point. If the discussion only exists on GitHub, people like me—but who may not have a GitHub account—will never be able to learn the technical aspects of an issue. This, in turn, makes them less efficient at providing adequate information or helping out where we can.
Personally, I have no problem going to GitHub or Mantis to contribute if I know an issue actually exists. However, I refuse to spend my time chasing discussions across the numerous platforms Gramps now uses—be it mailing lists, GitHub, the Mantis bug tracker, Discourse, or social media like Reddit and Facebook.
I stopped following the different Facebook groups for Gramps, Reddit, and all the mailing lists years ago. To be effective, we need a centralized place where users and developers can actually meet without these unnecessary barriers.
I can take one very important example, and that is the time/period handling in Gedcom/Gramps and other genealogy systems, which is historically wrong and will end up falsifying historical timespans/periods. It feels like the developers used a template from MS Project or Artemis instead of historical logic.
Treating an ‘After December’ as a ‘Start No Earlier Than’ constraint is a catastrophic logical error. In project management, this constraint exists for resource planning—if a resource becomes available early, the task might start sooner. But history is not a project plan; it is fixed. ‘After December’ means January or later. By using project management logic, you are allowing a ‘float’ where events leak into a month the source has already defined as passed. This is project management, not genealogy.
I have added this to discussed here:
and here:
If I had been aware of these issues at the moment they were raised, I would have been screaming my throat out not to follow this historically incorrect way of interpreting time periods! For me, this has actually become a reason to reconsider the use of Gramps and other genealogy software altogether.
I didn’t misinterpret your comment; I am challenging the very logic that developers ‘don’t need’ to look where the users actually are and involve users and especially power users of a system.
Author’s Note: This text was originally written in Norwegian and later translated and edited for clarity with the assistance of Google AI. Some structural adjustments were made during the process to improve coherence, but all analytical content and conclusions remain my own.
Edit: I added some more info in a section of my writing.>