Pruning the GitHub Issues Queue

We have a fair amount of GitHub issues still sitting open. Some of these are pretty old, and could use some cleaning up, as we’re currently sitting at 192 open issues. Granted, some of these are ongoing discussions, but it would be really useful to do a little housecleaning.

I think it would be useful to add some new labels that might explain why a particular issue is still open. (For example, “Discussion” could indicate that an issue has an in-depth discussion of a feature, “To Wiki” could denote an item that should be further documented on the wiki site, and “Beginner” could show easy bugs that anyone could dive in on to fix.


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Good point! Maybe if you create those labes and ask on Diaspora or here, volunteers could crawl through the issues and label them accordingly.

For new users creating a label can be frightening. But tagging issues with existing labels should have a lower entry barrier.

I think only project members can add labels which kind of sucks :stuck_out_tongue: Currently I really only see two guys active doing a lot of stuff with bugs and pull requests - MrZYX and Raven24.

Should we maybe somehow increase the amount of persons who can handle bugs and pulls? We just don’t have a process for this yet :slight_smile: Maybe a group that only contains the persons who are in the Github organisation and then those guys can vote on adding new guys to the organization - just to keep it controlled but allowing for new guys to come in when needed.

Infact, I will make a proposal about this :slight_smile:

No.

It was done in the past and is just awkward. We’ve now split discussions, people can’t decide if they should comment on old issues that they still have the problem, it killed discussion about topics and for example every time I see a duplicate I can’t decide if I should reopen the old issue or not. Lets not make this situation worse by continuing that behaviour. If you look at the comments on the closed issues nobody understands why they are closed, it’s that kind of in-transparent acting that made me sick of the project.

Face it, we have that many issues and things to improve, closing issues without a reason is just bad public relations.

We already have quickfix and newcomer, why add Beginner. A discussion label seems redundant, if it’s not labelled as (confirmed) bug it’s either a discussed feature, which you see if you open it, or an issue that needs feedback or discussion. What might be useful is a needs confirmation label, finding a clean way to reproduce an issue could be great task for newcomers and might actually expose where the bug is.

If we offload feature requests then here to loomio, wikis suck as discussion platform IMO and features need one.

@Jason totally the way to go about adding new people.

Agree with Sean and Jonne. To the extent, issues should only be closed if they’re either fixed, or were never actually an issue. In all cases, including issues that are not being closed, adding a comment with an update on that issue would be useful.

Jonne: Sounds very reasonable. I myself was pretty confused by some valid but closed issues on GH.