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Nonsense. You can always browse closed issues. The fact that issue is closed means absolutely nothing to the promoted methodology.

rudian 5y ago
What’s the point of having an open/closed status if an unsolved bug is now “closed”? You might as well close Issues and use Discussions instead.
- majkinetor 5y ago
  The point is that visibility state of the ticket is irrelevant and not connected to the resolving state. The point of closed bug is one among the not confirmed, not affecting too many users, hard to fix, unable to fix, no time to fix, no interest in fixing it, higher priority fixes piled up etc... Staleness is also meaningful on its own. Let me repeat - Nonsence.
  - rudian 5y ago
    > Staleness is also meaningful on its own. It absolutely isn’t. Look at Mozilla’s bugzilla instead: You’ll find plenty of bugs open for years and eventually fixed. Plus, stale bots don’t take Reactions into consideration. Spend a week on a popular repo and you’ll find a bunch of issues with dozens of “+1” reactions and that are closed as stale. Just because no one is working on a bug it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Heck I regularly see maintainer themselves fighting the stale bot over the months. It’s hilarious to see because they do it to themselves. - closed because stale - reopened - closed because stale - reopened The only issues that could be closed automatically are those that are not reproducible and are abandoned by the author. With no further details nor “me too”s, then it’s fine to close as stale.
    - majkinetor 5y ago
      > It absolutely isn’t. Look at Mozilla’s bugzilla instead: You’ll find plenty of bugs open for years and eventually fixed. So? Its still stale issue. Stale issue get fixes some times, but most of the time they don't. So its a metric. If you need good examples, Redmine is probably greatest example as in any major release they have something that lived 10+ years as a ticket. >Plus, stale bots don’t take Reactions into consideration. That is not true. As soon as somebody comments on my Github repo after the bot announce that issue is going to be closed soon, it resets the period to 6mo again. So this is configuration setting. I have not seen so far that somebody says something else except equivalent of "its still not resolved" just to reset the period. So now I have tickets with that last couple of years with last several comments that it is not resolved :S. Totally meaningless. > Just because no one is working on a bug it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Just because ticket is closed it doesn't mean bug is resolved. I usually have some form of meta label like resultion-wontfix, resolution-done, resolution-stale... > It’s hilarious to see because they do it to themselves. Its because they didn't get it. When you repeat the same meaningless thing over and over you should question the methodology.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- remram 5y ago
  We could have a whole talk about that too. Since GitHub added a "move issue to discussion" button, I've been getting a lot of replies like "I'm not sure how to address this immediately so I'm moving it to discussions". Yet another way to mangle your issue tracker into uselessness. At least this one is manual (for now).
Aissen 5y ago
stale bot does more than closing. It also locks issues; that is the gist of the discussion here. If projects want to treat issues as tasks, then they should at least auto-convert any locked issue into a forum post; or use appropriate tagging to hide issues they don't care about from their "task list". If projects don't want to handle this, disabling issues on their project is even better than this middle ground "stale bot locks it all".
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  That isn't the default behavior. Locking issues is ridiculous, IMO, because then you get tons of duplicate discussions and it's impossible to follow one discussion thread. Often times even close issues have fruitful conversation after the closure. Locking should only happen in extreme circumstances, like if the discussion gets heated and people are personally attacking others.
  - Aissen 5y ago
    Thanks for the clarification, I only remembered the "locked" behavior, and that seems to be what is discussed in the article (see main screenshot). I agree that closing without locking is a good enough middleground (i.e same as tagging the issue).
- majkinetor 5y ago
  Yeah, people do all kind of dumb things once you leave them options. The wrong thing is to extrapolate from it. That option is certainly valuable in some context, but not in general.
remram 5y ago
Whether you include "stale" issues to your view of "open" issues or not, those are not triaged. And once closed as stale, they are never getting triaged.
- majkinetor 5y ago
  > And once closed as stale, they are never getting triaged. That really depends on the community. I always search both closed and open and comment on closed issues if I find there is more to say.

rudian 5y ago

What’s the point of having an open/closed status if an unsolved bug is now “closed”? You might as well close Issues and use Discussions instead.

majkinetor 5y ago
The point is that visibility state of the ticket is irrelevant and not connected to the resolving state. The point of closed bug is one among the not confirmed, not affecting too many users, hard to fix, unable to fix, no time to fix, no interest in fixing it, higher priority fixes piled up etc... Staleness is also meaningful on its own. Let me repeat - Nonsence.
- rudian 5y ago
  > Staleness is also meaningful on its own. It absolutely isn’t. Look at Mozilla’s bugzilla instead: You’ll find plenty of bugs open for years and eventually fixed. Plus, stale bots don’t take Reactions into consideration. Spend a week on a popular repo and you’ll find a bunch of issues with dozens of “+1” reactions and that are closed as stale. Just because no one is working on a bug it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Heck I regularly see maintainer themselves fighting the stale bot over the months. It’s hilarious to see because they do it to themselves. - closed because stale - reopened - closed because stale - reopened The only issues that could be closed automatically are those that are not reproducible and are abandoned by the author. With no further details nor “me too”s, then it’s fine to close as stale.
  - majkinetor 5y ago
    > It absolutely isn’t. Look at Mozilla’s bugzilla instead: You’ll find plenty of bugs open for years and eventually fixed. So? Its still stale issue. Stale issue get fixes some times, but most of the time they don't. So its a metric. If you need good examples, Redmine is probably greatest example as in any major release they have something that lived 10+ years as a ticket. >Plus, stale bots don’t take Reactions into consideration. That is not true. As soon as somebody comments on my Github repo after the bot announce that issue is going to be closed soon, it resets the period to 6mo again. So this is configuration setting. I have not seen so far that somebody says something else except equivalent of "its still not resolved" just to reset the period. So now I have tickets with that last couple of years with last several comments that it is not resolved :S. Totally meaningless. > Just because no one is working on a bug it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Just because ticket is closed it doesn't mean bug is resolved. I usually have some form of meta label like resultion-wontfix, resolution-done, resolution-stale... > It’s hilarious to see because they do it to themselves. Its because they didn't get it. When you repeat the same meaningless thing over and over you should question the methodology.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
remram 5y ago
We could have a whole talk about that too. Since GitHub added a "move issue to discussion" button, I've been getting a lot of replies like "I'm not sure how to address this immediately so I'm moving it to discussions". Yet another way to mangle your issue tracker into uselessness. At least this one is manual (for now).

Aissen 5y ago

stale bot does more than closing. It also locks issues; that is the gist of the discussion here. If projects want to treat issues as tasks, then they should at least auto-convert any locked issue into a forum post; or use appropriate tagging to hide issues they don't care about from their "task list". If projects don't want to handle this, disabling issues on their project is even better than this middle ground "stale bot locks it all".

geerlingguy 5y ago
That isn't the default behavior. Locking issues is ridiculous, IMO, because then you get tons of duplicate discussions and it's impossible to follow one discussion thread. Often times even close issues have fruitful conversation after the closure. Locking should only happen in extreme circumstances, like if the discussion gets heated and people are personally attacking others.
- Aissen 5y ago
  Thanks for the clarification, I only remembered the "locked" behavior, and that seems to be what is discussed in the article (see main screenshot). I agree that closing without locking is a good enough middleground (i.e same as tagging the issue).
majkinetor 5y ago
Yeah, people do all kind of dumb things once you leave them options. The wrong thing is to extrapolate from it. That option is certainly valuable in some context, but not in general.

remram 5y ago

Whether you include "stale" issues to your view of "open" issues or not, those are not triaged. And once closed as stale, they are never getting triaged.

majkinetor 5y ago
> And once closed as stale, they are never getting triaged. That really depends on the community. I always search both closed and open and comment on closed issues if I find there is more to say.