Stale-bot

[benjimin]

Should we be automatically closing GitHub issues if they persist for a few months without being addressed?

For example, currently the stale bot runs on opendatacube/datacube-core, closing issues and labelling them wontfix.

This can be frustrating, as people often put a lot of effort into reporting (identifying and writing up) issues. Often the inactivity is due to lack of resources rather than the issues no longer being important or relevant. Closing off the issues reduces visibility and makes it difficult to track which ones are still outstanding vs resolved. Stale bot also causes issues to become cluttered with noise (as it makes comments, modifies tags repeatedly, obliges contributors to periodically "bump" discussion threads, and eventually the pinned tag gets spammed everywhere to circumvent the bot anyway).

Can we turn stale bot off?

[robbibt]

I second this request - over the past year I've had multiple issues automatically closed that I've spent considerable time and effort evaluating and documenting. Often I'll only realise they have been closed by chance, which means if I stop being vigilant about checking up on old issues they will just disappear.

I realise that clearing out truly defunct issues is important for prioritisation, but I don't think X time without activity is a good metric for this. If anything, many of the issues flagged by stale-bot have had no activity because they are "major" issues that have been put off because they require complex changes to the code base. They are still important and relevant, and worth keeping so they can actually be fixed when resources become available.

[woodcockr]

If you read the manual for stale bot you can pin items you want it to ignore. We had several hundred stale issues in here both creating expectations and showing a lack of clean up. Stalebot was discussed, including the above issue and and it has done its job well.

Turning it off completely is both unnecessary and will ultimately lead to the reason it was turned on, lots of noise and unresolved stale issues.

If you see it do its job, simply pin it - this will also remind you to be vigilant, which is a good thing.

[robbibt]

Hey @woodcockr, I don't think all members have permission to tag datacube issues - I don't, so the pinning method unfortunately won't work for me unless I pester another user to do it for me.

With respect, I feel this issue was closed prematurely without a chance to receive any further discussion or attempt to find a solution to what a few of us feel is a legitimate problem in this repo. Perhaps increasing the time-to-stale from six months to a year could be a good middle ground to still get the above-mentioned advantages of stale-bot but reduce the number of relevant issues getting closed?

[woodcockr]

Are you sure you are unable to add the necessary label?

I can't see a permission to prevent that.

The close was accidental, to much speed with the mouse.

[BexDunn]

Hi @woodcockr If I wanted to pin the issue, how would I do it? I tried to add a label to this issue and I'm not able to.

[robbibt]

Example of not being able to add labels/tags to an issue (I.e. no little gear icon, and the whole right panel is non-interactive):

[woodcockr]

Looks you need to be a member of the ODC github in order to add labels. Makes sense that triaging isn't done by people outside the ODC team I'm just a little surprised you don't appear to be in the developers list. Suggest you ping someone from your org who is a member to pin the issue (if they intend to ensure its followed up) or get yourself added (which would make sense if it is your intention is to fix the issue).

[SpacemanPaul]

There's no stalebot here, so I'm doing it by hand.