Triage: closing Stale Issues and Pull requests

[jukzi]

To keep a maintainable list of Issues and PRs i would like to close Issues and even PRs where

• no active Contributor is showing interest within ~ 1 Months,

with link to https://github.com/eclipse-platform#community: Closing as not-planned due to inactivity. Please see https://github.com/eclipse-platform#community I suggest that Eclipse® IDE Working Group or Individuals who would like to get paid for fixing Issues could leave a message there how to get involved if wanted. The rule implies that Issues created by active Contributors should not be closed without request to allow contributors to queue up work for later. The period is rather short to give the creator a timely feedback and reflects the current reality that active contributors typically react within a week or never. It does not hinder anybody to reopen. With "active Contributor" i mean both committers and non-committers who are actively contributing to Eclipse IDE. A list of closed issues as not planned can still be shown with a filtered search like: https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aclosed+reason%3A%22not+planned%22+user%3Aeclipse-platform

WDYT?

[mickaelistria]

+1 for this, and there were already several attempts and discussions about it, and while it helped reducing the backlog and keeping focus, it's worth mentioning that auto-closing also irritated some reporters (contributors) who made angry comments on the tracker. However, keeping everyone happy by keeping false hope is IMO not much nicer on the long run than being honest and clearly set expectations.

1 month is IMO way too short. Even the most active and available contributors sometimes get silent on an issue for a month because some other work took higher priority or just took some time-off. IMO somewhere between 3 to 6 months is more correct. I don't think "the current reality that active contributors typically react within a week or never" is a reality, but more your perception. Some data would be necessary to confirm this or not.

I also don't think we should distinguish casts of contributors here. A reporter is an active contributor too, and sometimes there are reported that are more active than some committers. So it's simpler and more fair to just set the same warning and the same rule for every issue, independently of who reported it or who took action.

[laeubi]

As mentioned on earlier discussions, closing issues to get a "clean backlog" is one of the worst things one can do for an open source community.

Just because no one is fixing things yet, do not mean they are not worth it, if one likes to "plan" things, github offers projects (even though I doubt there is much interest in "planing" time): https://docs.github.com/en/issues/planning-and-tracking-with-projects/learning-about-projects/about-projects

If one wants to mark an issue (independent on the "level" of the reporter) there is the help wanted label. "Not planed" is a more polite way for saying "won't fix" and not a collection of things one might want to do.