Add actions/stale to close stale issues

[shenxianpeng]

I get inspired from this issue #6715 (comment), it would be helpful to consider implementing actions/stale that automatically alert to issues only labeled S: awaiting response and eventually close (if there is no reply) to minimize the maintainer's workload.

Please advise if needed to include other labels, maybe state: needs reproducer?

Apologies if this is a trivial improvement causes trouble.

[pradyunsg]

I don't think we should be closing issues due to being stale with automation; especially since we don't have any automation to remove the relevant label available for external-to-project folks.

I'd be inclined to set up automation or some other infrastructure to make triaging and maintaining issue status easier, rather than blanket closing issues like this.

[pradyunsg]

Thanks for filing this PR @shenxianpeng but I'm going to say that we're not going to adopt this bot for now. We can revisit this at a later date if things are meaningfully different around how we're working through this issue tracker.

[shenxianpeng]

Hi @pradyunsg thank you for your response. This pull request is created specifically ONLY to address issues labeled S: awaiting response and operates as follows:

• When the maintainer asks for more information and add a S: awaiting response label:

  • If there's no response within 30 days, the stale action will automatically add a comment: "This issue is stale because it has been open 30 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 5 days.", and add a Stale label.
  • If there's still no response after 5 additional days, the stale action will proceed to close the issue as "not planned."

• If there is a new comment or the maintainer does not close this issue by removing the Stale label, the issue will remain open.

I think the maintainers have spent enough time waiting for a response. it should be closed if no additional information is provided.

[shenxianpeng]

Currently, pip has 938 open issues. For those labeled S: awaiting response without a received reply, it would be beneficial to consider removing them from the open issue list. If it's a valid issue, it can always be reopened or reported again; otherwise, let's aim to keep the issue list free of unnecessary clutter.

[pfmoore]

I agree with @pradyunsg here, I don't think we want to auto-close (I thought we'd experimented with that before and decided we didn't like it, but that may have been another project). In my experience as a user, whenever I've dealt with projects or systems that implement any sort of auto-closing, the interaction has felt impersonal, and focused more on closing off the interaction than on building a community and working together. Maybe that's over-stating things, but that's not an impression I want pip to be giving.

Currently, pip has 938 open issues. For those labeled S: awaiting response without a received reply, it would be beneficial to consider removing them from the open issue list

Why? I'm not convinced that simply removing issues from the list makes that much difference. It's certainly never affected my use of the tracker in any significant way.

If it's a valid issue, it can always be reopened or reported again

The user who opened the issue can't (as far as I know) reopen it. And the simple fact that their issue has been closed discourages further interaction. It may be that the user had something come up and couldn't get back as quickly as we'd have liked. Maybe it's a hobby user who simply doesn't work on their project as frequently as our timescales assume. Making the good actors pay (by extra effort to request an extension if they do need longer to respond) so we can manage the bad actors (the people who file drive-by issues and don't respond) doesn't feel like the right trade-off to me.

Sorry - I don't want to give the impression this is a massive issue to me, but I do think it affects the impression we give to users - and our limited resources mean that we struggle at times to give a good impression anyway. So I'd rather not take a step in a direction which (in my view) makes us feel even more impersonal.