Stale bot for Nix just closed a bunch of stuff

[Ericson2314]

Stale bot for Nix just closed a bunch of stuff. In Nixpkgs we agreed it is was OK to mark as stale, closing should always be done by humans.

I assume this was just a misconfiguration, but either way, I this should fixed and reverted.

Nix itself is a case of needing more delegation so it’s possible to get through the backlog, and so auto-closing items is worse than crude in masking that problem and sweeping it under the rug.

[ryantm]

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/4526

[abathur]

A little oblique, but I think we’re drawing closer to the point where we could implement a much better triage view/queue on top of the new (beta) github issues. The main point would be building an intentional triage view, removing issues that are pending feedback from it, and either returning them when they get feedback or closing them if they don’t (within a reasonable time frame). This would make the stale bot moot, while also not requiring humans to keep up with whether issues have gotten the feedback they need to be actionable.

Two previous posts with more context:

Merge fast and break things

This Fall I noticed that GH have started dogfooding their new issues/projects beta for a public roadmap. They aren’t scheduled yet, but it seems like the main shortcomings for building better issue triage on it are all at least on the issue-specific view (I imagine issues 126, 129, 130 and 133 being the most-helpful). I don’t think it can meet any needs in the short term, but it’s probably good to be chewing on how it could help since it might be usable at some point in the next year. I imagi…

Queues: Let's make something a tad better than "PRs already reviewed"?

This is a little tangential, but GH is slowly but steadily plodding ahead with their issues/project beta which may eventually yield some new levers on that side of things. I described this previously in the post linked below (though I didn’t realize I was quoting sort numbers and not issue IDs): https://discourse.nixos.org/t/merge-fast-and-break-things/16957/8?u=abathur I think the issues I had in mind as being most helpful were: Issue level custom metadata #277 New automation functions for …

Since I last commented on this, they’ve added options for bulk- and auto-adding issues (see The new GitHub Issues - April 7th update - The GitHub Blog).

You can keep an eye on issues Archives - The GitHub Blog for their updates.

[Ericson2314]

I have opened an RFC for this at [RFC 0124] Do not auto-close stale Nix issues and PRs, matching Nixpkgs's policy by Ericson2314 · Pull Request #124 · NixOS/rfcs · GitHub

[Ericson2314]

By the reactions in various places, this seems broadly popular. In that case, please volunteer to shepherd the RFC! The sooner we can get through the RFC process, the less stalebot-closed items will need to be dredged back open afterwords.