Open bugs vs. adoption: Argo CD is a clear outlier across CNCF projects

[jdomag]

We use Argo CD widely across our organization. It fits many of our GitOps
patterns really well, and overall we're happy we adopted it.

But we've also had to accept that it isn't always reliable. Almost every week
we hit some strange behaviour, and most of the time it turns out to be a bug
that is already reported here on GitHub.

The number of open issues and bugs is very high. This made me wonder: is this
normal for CNCF projects, or is it specific to Argo CD? To find out, I compared
GitHub stars (a rough signal of how widely a project is adopted) with the number
of open issues and open bugs across all CNCF graduated projects.

A note on method: projects don't all use the same bug label (Argo CD uses bug,
Kubernetes uses kind/bug, others use type/bug, and a few don't label bugs at
all). For each project I counted issues using that project's own bug label, so
the comparison is as fair as I could make it. It's not perfect, but the gap is
far too large to be explained by labelling differences alone.

The result surprised me. Argo CD is not even in the top 5 for stars, but it is
number one for both open bugs and open issues - by a wide margin. It has around
1,800 open bug-labelled issues. The next project on the list, Kubernetes, has
about 670 - almost three times fewer, and Kubernetes is a much larger project
with far more stars.

So here is my honest question to the maintainers and the community: isn't this
a signal to slow down on new features for a while and put more focus on fixing
bugs? Argo CD already has a strong feature set. If reliability doesn't improve,
some teams may start looking at alternatives that have fewer features but are
more stable.

I'm raising this because we care about the project and want to keep using it.
See the comparison below.

[reggie-k]

Thank you @jdomag for raising this.

I think that I would separate the product stability from the number of open issues/PRs, as we don't close issues as "aggressively" as other projects (I mean that currently we have no bots closing old/stale issues or issues that don't have a clear reproduction scenario etc), previous discussion here:
#20011
Numbers alone of open issues and open PRs may not be providing the full picture, maybe the speed at which critical bugs are being fixed / speed at which community PRs for critical bugs are being reviewed and merged is a more representing data.

With regard to the product stability - could you share some open GitHub issues you are facing in your environment, along with GitHub issues you have encountered lately that were fixed?

[jdomag]

Hi @reggie-k

Thanks for the reply. I think it's a fair point that Argo CD doesn't
auto-close issues, and I actually appreciate that - I agree with @crenshaw-dev
that closing an issue just because no one looked at it for a while isn't right.
That said, a "stale" label could still help by nudging the original reporter to
retest and confirm whether the bug still happens in the current version. I don't
think bugs should be left out of that stale workflow.

A few issues we're running into right now:
#9413
#12902
#11953

But my point isn't really about any single issue - it's about the total number
of open issues. I hadn't seen the discussion in #20011,
so it's good to hear you're already working on this.

[reggie-k]

@jdomag Thanks for the feedback and for elaborating - about the 3 issues, could you provide more details about your setup, version and Argo CD configuration on each of thosee issues?