Hm. Why *do* issue trackers automatically close issues marked as duplicate? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep them open and visually group them together, and auto-close them once the duplicant issue is resolved, so that it gives you an idea of how many people have individually reported the same issue and no context/variations are lost?
@Vampire I feel like that's better solved with something like an inline visual expansion of 'related' (ie. duplicate) issues - especially because "duplicate" is often a fuzzy definition, with them not being *exact* duplicates, just different issues with a shared cause
@joepie91 Hmh not sure how to visualise how that would look like.
@Vampire I'm thinking something vaguely analogous to the inline reference/definition/code preview in Brackets and VS Code.
@joepie91 I think I get what you mean and it might be better than merging, though I still have some unspecific UI/UX concerns.
Then I said merging, I meant it like old forums dealt with duplicate topics, but that usually disrupted the flow as you suddenly have a bunch of comments which refer to a different idea.
Hmh
Yeah, I dunno.
not sure if this is rhetorical or not?
@joepie91 because a lot of people will find one of those issues, and marking a single canonical place for all discussion of a particular issue is really useful.
not that there couldn't be better UI around that, it just seems like "close all but one of the issues, put links to them in a single canonical issue" has a pretty good balance of ease of use/low friction and centralizing discussion.
@alive In practice a lot of 'duplicates' are not *exact* duplicates but rather different issues caused by the same underlying cause, and in that context this model unfortunately doesn't really work either.
@joepie91 yeah, but that strikes me as a problem with the resources/philosophy that the maintainers have, which i think is something that's hard to move the needle on by tweaking software.
@alive To be clear, I'm not saying that those shouldn't have been marked as duplicates - from a fixing perspective it makes sense to do so, since they have a shared cause. Just that the issues are not *identical*. That's definitely a case that can be accommodated in the software, one way or another.
@joepie91 I think merging would make more sense as you don't loose context, but also don't have to deal with multiple issues where context is spread across them.