[SciPy-Dev] Issues backlog

[Joshua Wilson]

Hey all,

The SciPy repo currently has 1,242 open issues. The oldest open issue
is from April 25th, 2013. There is definitely some signal in those old
issues, but, as the project has evolved quite a bit from then, also
quite a bit of noise (e.g. feature requests that one person cared
about many years ago).

We could spend a lot of time going through the old issues and closing
the ones that are no longer relevant, but that's going to take a lot
of time and I do not believe it is a high-leverage way to spend our
limited developer time. Instead I propose that we simply close issues
over a certain cutoff date. More concretely, we:

- Determine a cutoff date beyond which we will close issues
- Announce a date when we will close the old issues
- During that time, if anyone wants to preserve an old issue they can
open a new, updated issue, or perhaps adjust the SciPy roadmap if
something is particularly important.

Anyway, I am sure this will be controversial, so looking forward to
hearing everyone's thoughts!

- Josh