About stalebot configuration

[andreslucena]

In this last week, I've seen a couple issues where stalebot was a problem. See #4667 (comment) and #4667 (comment)

Sometime ago, we thought that adding a bot that lowers the number of issues that we can focus was a good idea, but this could not be the brightest idea after seeing how this works in the real world.

As @microstudi summarized in one of those issues:

For respect to all the people that bother to create issues, I'd remove the stalebot completly and deal with old issues manually.

There's lots of discussion about stalebot in the developer community, as an example there's this Hacker News submission.

Our configuration used to be more aggressive, now if it has a label/project/etc. it won't be closed. But specially on issues created before these changes, we'd need to check all the closed issues by it, with labels "stale-issue" and "wontfix" to check:

1. Check that they can still be reproduced in the develop branch. On those cases, we should remove the stale-issue/wontfix label and give them the 'bug' label.
2. If it's feature proposal (created previously to Metadecidim roadmap process dogfooding strategy), then we should invite the original creator to go to Metadecidim to create it. We can write a template for those cases.
3. We should also change the behavior on closing issues. I think having a stale-issue label is good, and also that the bot leaves a message saying that this is indeed stale, so we can check the issue manually and see if it's still pertinent. What's a bad idea is to have an automatism for closing issues. For what I've read, the solution would be to have "days-before-close: -1" so it doesn't close them.

If anyone has any other idea/strategy/configuration, this would be the place to talk about it.

[microstudi]

Having a stalebot to label old issues is fine, this way we can manually filter them from time to time and try to see the current status and, eventually, manually closing them if necessary.
Maybe, if the stalebot can do it, it could automatically mention the author, a ping with a comment saying if that is still relevant etc

[Quentinchampenois]

The idea to mention the author is great, I found an issue (I hope it is the right project) that let me think that it is not yet implemented here. As we can see in this issue, author tries to keep it open but won't try indefinitely

[andreslucena]

Ironically (or not) that issue was closed by... stalebot 😄

[Quentinchampenois]

Hello,

I agree the stalebot is interesting for having history about staled and closed issues. Also, to me stalebot should not be able to close an issue because it doesn't really help since the it may still be present. Moreover, closing automatically issue may probably create duplicated issues in future.

However, to me having a bot that just prevent that an issue is staled is a bit redundant because if an issue is opened since several months, it seems to be staled. To me the interesting point is to understand with is it staled, maybe because of complexity, not enough clear, etc... Perhaps providing informations, if there is some ideas, on a staled issue can encourage its resolution

[andreslucena]

At least with the current configuration it's useful for me as it mentions me and I can recheck what happened there and if it's still relevant. Labeling allows me to quickly filter, if not I could search for where the stalebot user has activity, but that's a bit more difficult.

[Quentinchampenois]

Yes ok I understand