[SciPy-Dev] Issues backlog

[Ralf Gommers]

On Sun, Aug 4, 2019 at 1:56 PM Stefan van der Walt <stefanv at berkeley.edu>
wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 3, 2019, at 22:22, Dieter Werthmüller wrote:
> > I think this is a very good idea, and it should be applied to issues and
> > PRs. However, instead of age as a criteria I would use inactivity (e.g.,
> > if there is an old issue from 2013 that has activity discussions every
> > year then it should not be closed).
>
> Agreed, the last modified age may be a better measure.  That way we don't
> need to recreate issues we want to keep open, we can simply leave a comment
> / add a label / edit the description.
>
> But this method for closing issues can also be infuriating to users: how
> many times have you come across a project where an issue was described in
> detail with debugging info, only to be closed by a bot due to inactivity?
> Perhaps that can be addressed by setting the inactivity-time-to-closure to
> a high enough duration, perhaps 3 years.
>

I agree with the infuriating part: each time I've had an experience like
that with another project (e.g. pip), it has been extremely annoying. To
the extent I decided to never contribute again. Issues closed that were
valid, PRs closed that didn't get reviewed, etc. It is a good way to tell
contributors that their contributions aren't valued, and/or lose useful
information.

In general, valid bug reports should simply not be closed imho. The
exception is probably new feature requests. About 300 of the 1200 open
issues have the "enhancement" label. Looking through the older enhancements
shows that many can be closed. However even there, there's useful content
in some. I'd much rather go through them and close by hand than have some
bot do it. This has multiple advantages:
- doesn't anger contributors
- keeps the useful ones
- is probably _less_ work (at 3 minutes per issue one could triage the 200
issues that haven't been touched in the last 2 years in a single day),
choosing and maintaining a bot is easily going to take someone that much
time.



> If this method is enacted, I suggest an email to the list once a month
> with issues that were automatically closed.  That may at least provide an
> opportunity for those interested to go back and "save" any important ones
> they care about.
>

This is actually even more work. It asks all maintainers and mailing list
contributors to triage with such an email, so many people will be doing
duplicate work.

Cheers,
Ralf
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