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cf-convention / vocabularies

Issues and source files for CF controlled vocabularies
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Standard names bot: update message to reflect possible consensus #136

Closed sadielbartholomew closed 1 year ago

sadielbartholomew commented 1 year ago

The bot established via GitHub Actions to help with the maintenance of the standard names proposal process (see cf-convention/vocabularies#106) is now all set up and working perfectly (thanks to @feggleton). That said, after seeing it in use in practice, @davidhassell and I were concerned that the message auto-generated by the bot after the month long period of inactivity, namely:

https://github.com/cf-convention/discuss/blob/d4538159bd2fbe40fcec143e8a38ede22709809e/.github/workflows/stale-issue-reminder.yml#L23

(with a link to an example of this message as raised in practice being, say, cf-convention/vocabularies#20) might be somewhat misleading or confusing in cases where the thread has come to a state of agreement or consensus (or close enough) prior to the automated GitHub message (and that consensus being the reason for the staleness / lack of further comments).

There are many such issues which are just waiting for lack of activity indicating consensus at which point the acceptance process starts, I believe, and the current message isn't as appropriate as it is for Issues whereby, alternatively, the conversation has gone stale for some reason but there is/are still disagreement(s). See 'Example case' below for a specific case of an Issue, though there are many recently that fit the pattern.

Specifically, the component '... please comment on standard name requests to assist with agreement and acceptance.' might leave a proposer thinking there is something left for them to do, when really it is on the CF Conventions maintainer teams side to then start the acceptance process. And we don't want them to re-comment, because that will re-start the clock with respect to the time at which the latest comment was made!

Therefore, we think it would be a good idea to slightly change the phrasing of this bot message (stale-issue-message) to prevent any misunderstanding. I have provided some suggestions below under 'Suggestions'.

Example case

One good example of this is cf-convention/vocabularies#163, where the automated message was raised just after Jonathan had commented:

Thanks <propser's user tag>. If no-one expresses any concerns about this in the next week or two it should be accepted for inclusion in the standard name table.

and clearly that time had passed since the stale activity message was triggered.

Suggestions

Some of my suggestions for the updated message, in light of the above, are, with changes/additions in bold:

however anything along those lines would be fine (details aren't so important!). Really it depends on what action, if any, a proposer should take when there has been at least a month-long apparent consensus.

sethmcg commented 1 year ago

I agree with this proposal. I like the language in the second suggestion better; it implies "this is the normal progression" more than the first, to my mind.

feggleton commented 1 year ago

Thanks @sadielbartholomew, that's a really good point and these messages are always open for edit! Happy with either of those suggestions. Happy for you to go ahead and make that change to the message. Makes perfect sense. This is definitely still a work in progress/trial in my mind so open to any refinement.

sadielbartholomew commented 1 year ago

Thanks @feggleton for your thoughts and permission to make the change. I (we, including David) were aware the bot is still in its early phases, but thought best to raise this earlier rather than later since the message does get raised quite often given the standard names traffic here on the 'discuss' repo.

Happy for you to go ahead and make that change to the message.

Great, thanks. I'll put up a PR for this today.

JonathanGregory commented 1 year ago

Dear @sadielbartholomew

Thanks for raising this issue. I agree with you about the usefulness of the bot which Fran set up, and that this message could be rephrased to avoid confusion. I agree with @sethmcg as well about the "normal progression", but I prefer "consensus" from your first alternative. Since you point out that the message is addressed to proposers in particular, I'd suggest:

This issue has had no activity in the last 30 days. If you proposed this issue or have contributed to the discussion, please reply to any outstanding concerns. If there has been little or no discussion, please comment on this issue, to assist with reaching a decision. If the proposal seems to have come to a consensus, please wait for the moderators to take the next steps towards acceptance. Standard name moderators are also reminded to review.

Best wishes

Jonathan

sadielbartholomew commented 1 year ago

Thanks for your thoughts also, @JonathanGregory. I really like your new suggestion, here (indeed, mine were mainly as an illustration to start the conversation, I am not tied to using either). In particular I like how it is indicating who the message is addressing, because now you state this I realise it isn't 100% clear in the original either (I guess it addresses anyone checking the issue, not just the proposer, but someone may assume otherwise).

Happy to go with that, then, assuming nobody raises any objections (maybe I can wait a day or two before putting up the PR, since it is a one-line change). That said, I am just thinking it might be nice to break those three 'if' statements into bullet points, so people can pick out which is relevant to them more easily. Something like (I added one word to introduce those bullets, which could be changed or left out, depending on what people prefer):

This issue has had no activity in the last 30 days. Accordingly:

  • If you proposed this issue or have contributed to the discussion, please reply to any outstanding concerns.
  • If there has been little or no discussion, please comment on this issue, to assist with reaching a decision.
  • If the proposal seems to have come to a consensus, please wait for the moderators to take the next steps towards acceptance.

Standard name moderators are also reminded to review.

though I'd have to check that line breaks and bullet points are possible to specify and do get rendered for the auto-generated message set in the YAML. What do you think? It's not crucial, though, of course, so your suggestion as-is would be fine by me.

JonathanGregory commented 1 year ago

Thanks, Sadie. I think the formatting improves it. J

davidhassell commented 1 year ago

Thanks, @sadielbartholomew. I like the new text, and don't have strong opinions either way on the formatting.

sadielbartholomew commented 1 year ago

Please can anyone who has further thoughts about this, one way or the other, comment within the next day, since I'll put a PR up tomorrow with the wording suggested by Jonathan since everyone so far seems happy with that (correct me if I am wrong, of course) which should be merge-able very quickly, being a one or few line (at most) and functionally-trivial change. Thanks.

davidhassell commented 1 year ago

which should be merge-able very quickly, being a one or few line (at most) and functionally-trivial change

Sounds good to me.

sadielbartholomew commented 1 year ago

PR (#241) to close this is now up. Sorry for the delay, due to this falling off my radar.

@feggleton I have assigned you as a reviewer since you wrote the bot, but if anyone else would like to review, please do self-assign as a reviewer (and if you can't or don't have time to review Fran, please go ahead and un-assign and I'll find someone else).