Stalled RFCs - Proposing closing RFCs with no interest

Hi everyone, we wanted to bring some extra attention to RFC 130 as it is proposing closing RFCs that have not managed to find shepherds in 2 months. The logic is that if there isn’t enough community interest to find 3 shepherds in 2 months the feature is likely not of high value.

However closing things that have some interest (even if small) has caused controversy in the past (example RFC 51) so we wanted to make sure we got some input to avoid a too-similar change slipping in unnoticed.

Personally I think the use case is quite different and while I am against closing issues I think that closing RFCs makes sense. But I don’t feel strongly so really just want to do what the community prefers overall.

Pros

  • Signals to the author that there isn’t enough interest to do this.
  • Has well defined process for re-opening RFCs if they were closed for this reason.
  • Keeps the default RFC search focused on RFCs that are “making progress” and where community input is the most valuable.

Cons

  • May discourage authors.
  • Will make it harder to add support to these RFCs that need it most.

Alternative

The main alternative is creating a status: low interest label that will be used instead. This can be used by the RFC Steering Committee to ignore these RFCs but they will otherwise be open and waiting for more shepherds.


Feel free to leave any feedback here or in the RFC itself. I’ll try to gather the most popular opinion and update the RFC to match.

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