In every complex project, we use a lot of external dependencies and tooling. Of course, they have bugs.
Thanks to Github and the like, it is very easy to fork a project and track issues in libraries dependencies so that's not the scope of this question.
The tooling however, can me much more complex to inspect, debug, and submit. Let's restrict here to the Open Source tooling.
If the tool is only used for development and testing purposes, the priority for fixing these annoying bugs is quite low. That's why often, we don't even report the issue as soon as someone found a workaround.
This is bad. We should keep track of the tooling issues as it explain a lot about the life of the project and having them somewhere show everyone that we can fix it, and it will be some value in these fixes. But in the other hand we can't put these issues in the same bucket that the project because they are unrelated and will pollute our issue tracker.
Happiness of my team is one of my top priority, and I cry inside when I see them having to document complex rituals for random situations involving specific conditions met once a week or less.
How do you handle the issues related to your tooling ? How do you prioritize these bugs ?
I realize that my question is quite vague, but I hope it's clear anyway. I will be happy to improve it if you see some flows.