fixes-GH-#2556-Dealing with stale issues

[rahul799]

fix #2556

Review Time Estimate

• Immediately
• Within one week
• When possible

Types of changes

• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
• Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)

Checklist:

• My change requires a change to the documentation.
• I have updated the CHANGELOG.md.
• I have updated the documentation accordingly.
• I have read the CONTRIBUTING document.
• I have added tests to cover my changes.
• All new and existing tests passed.

[infotroph]

Do you know whether the label change events will show up in any news feeds? I don't think we need to go too far out of our way to generate notifications if they won't happen automatically, but if I got a ping every time an issue was marked stale that might be a useful push to look at it and possibly decide I had time to fix it.

[rahul799]

Yes, they do show in the notification.

[infotroph]

If we can only have one label exempt from flagging, maybe we should back up and ask how useful exemption is -- Will enough issues be unfairly labeled stale that it's a burden to manually unflag them?

My prediction is that the main benefit of the stale flag will happen at the moment it's applied -- hopefully seeing an old issue get flagged will goad us into revisiting and resolving it. If the flag makes us revisit an issue, conclude it's neither resolvable nor closable yet, and manually unflag it, that seems like an acceptable outcome... But then again I'm the guy who didn't like auto-tagging in the first place, so maybe I shouldn't be the one driving this conversation 😀

[rahul799]

Should I take it to slack?

[infotroph]

Yeah, Slack seems useful to get. Would you be willing to solicit feedback on Slack (it'll be slow-moving there too, especially over weekends) and then summarize the outcome of the discussion here so that it's not lost in the chat logs?

[rahul799]

sure

[rahul799]

Summary - As per the discussion on slack, we have some pros of using it.

• A way of resurfacing issues that haven’t been touched in a while and reminding/embarrassing us into dealing with them… or at least touching them again and, therefore, resetting the timer.
• Probably somebody realizes that the issue is already fixed & can close it.

Conclusion - We are going to use this action.

I will like to add that we have one more feature that is operation-per-run which I have kept 25. is it okay?

[infotroph]

Hah, the operations per run was going to be my last question! Am I right this means if there are say 35 issues eligible to be marked stale today, it will mark 25 of them today and then handle the rest on its next run tomorrow? If so then yes, 25 seems fine -- hopefully after the initial backlog is cleared, we'll never come close to the limit again.

[rahul799]

Yes, you are correct.

[infotroph]

Approved pending one more tweak to make the labels match the existing ones. Thanks to tackling this!