We need more issue labels and contributors should have access to them.

[jwdonahue]

I have just completed a comprehensive review of all the open issues here at semver/semver. I found myself wishing I could apply tags or labels to them as I went along. It turns out that GitHub offers some support for labels in Issues and Pull-requests, but they do not seem to be accessible with my current status and/or the current repo configuration.

The current set of defined labels are:

• proposal
• question
• won't fix

Only a subset of the typical tags I am used to seeing on well managed projects, and completely useless to me because they are not available. Even as I write-up this issue, I am not presented with any way to categorize this issue through the use of tags/labels. @mojombo & @haacked, please fix this. I propose the following set of labels should be added to the above list:

• Answer
  -- Use when you have a proposed answer for a question.
• Duplicate
• Reviewed by maintainer
  -- Use when one of the semver maintainers has reviewed an issue, with or without reply.
• Close requested
  -- An argument has been made to close an issue and the OP has been explicitly asked to close. This is for reviewers to mark issues that maintainers should probably close. You could filter on Answer & Close requested that are older than some reasonable number of days or weeks, and focus your valuable time on closing those.
• Link to foreign standard request.
  -- Some of the best proposals that I have seen posted here, should be stand-alone/foreign standards that SemVer should cross-link to. There's currently a dearth of such standards, but maybe if we encourage them, they will come?
• Punt to 3.x.x
  -- Lots of good proposals would be breaking changes. Whether or not there's ever going to be an effort to begin work on SemVer 3.x.x, this would be a good label for those. Punt plus Close Requested would save the maintainers some time when pruning issues.
• Spelling or Grammar
  -- In the spec world, this is a bug report (issues) or fix (PR).
• Bug (other than spelling or grammar)
  -- For spec defects in logic or other issues that don't fall into spelling or grammar.

The above would be a good start IMO.

References:

• https://help.github.com/articles/labeling-issues-and-pull-requests/
• https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-label/
• https://help.github.com/articles/applying-labels-to-issues-and-pull-requests/

[jwdonahue]

Awesome! Thank you.