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Revisit policy of auto-closing issues #6866

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mhucka opened this issue Dec 20, 2024 · 2 comments
Open

Revisit policy of auto-closing issues #6866

mhucka opened this issue Dec 20, 2024 · 2 comments
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kind/health For CI/testing/release process/refactoring/technical debt items

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@mhucka
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mhucka commented Dec 20, 2024

Currently, the workflow for stale issues (.github/workflows/stale.yml) is set to label something as stale after 30 days of inactivity and auto-close the issue 30 days after that. This is a pretty short duration, so I'd like to propose we review this policy.

Closing inactive issues is a way to reduce the burden on maintainers, of course, but IMHO it's important to balance that against antagonizing contributors. Legit issues don't always see activity within 30 days, and may not be addressable in 60. As it is, we're finding ourselves manually having to reopen some issues, which is actually its own maintenance burden.

Some points to discuss:

  • Duration. longer may be better, but infinite duration is also undesirable; we need a happy middle ground.
  • Issue types. Maybe some types of issues should have different durations. For example, feature requests could potentially have longer durations.
  • Additional procedures. For example, maybe we could add a step of reviewing stale issues & PRs as part of the regular triage process (in biweekly Cirq Cynqs), to decide which ones to deliberately label as triage/wont-fix or similar.

Additional reading:

@mhucka mhucka added the kind/health For CI/testing/release process/refactoring/technical debt items label Dec 20, 2024
@mhucka mhucka self-assigned this Dec 20, 2024
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mhucka commented Jan 8, 2025

@mhucka
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mhucka commented Jan 8, 2025

The docs for the actions/stale action we use mentions an additional flag that might be worth exploring:

exempt-all-milestones: If set to true, issues or pull requests with a milestone will not be marked as stale automatically.

It kind of makes sense that something assigned to a milestone shouldn't be flagged as stale. If we assigned it to a milestone, then presumably we decided it's something we want done, even if it takes longer than the stale issue timeout. What do people think about using this flag?

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