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This is exactly my issue with stalebot and I think it is a great disservice to the community. Closing issues without a maintainer looking at the issue is bad. I

by bouke 4y ago

This is exactly my issue with stalebot and I think it is a great disservice to the community. Closing issues without a maintainer looking at the issue is bad. I expect at least some triaging from the maintainer before the stalebot comes in and swipes the issue under the carpet.

yebyen 4y ago
Maintainers are great, and working open source projects are good, but not every project has an active maintainer, and it's my opinion that practically no one in Open Source signed up to be a "repo owner", unless they've gone to the trouble of developing some kind of governance structure to signal that they should be counted upon for support. That signal is an affirmative signal though, it's not implied. If you don't get a reply, and a robot closed your inquiry without comment then my guy, it seems that the signal has been sent clearly and received! If you disagree the fork button is in the upper right hand corner, you are the maintainer now! I don't mean this to be disrespectful, but there are a lot of open source projects supporting companies and the companies often don't contribute back in any way. So while I appreciate the PR, and I'm going to be as polite as possible before I close it, not everyone has time for that, and nobody owes it.
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  This, basically. And for probably 80% of issues, a maintainer might actually read the notification, but to click through, leave some sort of intelligent / honest reply, and either click close or reply and move on takes infinitely more time (when you're dealing with 100+ new issues and PRs a day) than not responding and moving to the next one. A non-response does signal one thing—the maintainer doesn't seem interested enough to touch the issue. Fork the project or maintain a patch separately if you need to, and move on.
- lucideer 4y ago
  I'm not the commenter, but I think you're misinterpreting the intent of the comment (or at the very least I interpreted it differently). > I expect at least some triaging from the maintainer before the stalebot comes in I didn't read this as "maintainers should always triage", I read this as "stalebot shouldn't axe issues unless maintainers are triaging" (see my original comment for why). One could reword the above comment for extra clarity/emphasis as: > I expect that before stalebot comes in [it should check whether] some triaging from the maintainer has been done] i.e. I don't think @bouke was shitting on maintainers, just on stale bot as a product. Of course maintainers should be under no obligation to do anything whatsoever: none of that is particularly relevant here when we're just discussing whether stale bot adds value. (I see Jeff has replied here too but also completely skipped over addressing criticisms of stale bot & focusing on the strawman of maintainer responsibility - which noone is debating)
  - yebyen 4y ago
    I avoid stalebot for the reason you describe, because I want a maintainer to be reading and triaging issues, and I am in a job description where I can reasonably anticipate to be that person at least 40% of the time, even if I may not be coming through often enough (with a high batting average.) I'm really lucky to work for a company that can prioritize this type of interaction! But when maintainers are overextended or nobody is able to commit that way, I see the value of stalebot. I spent a year closing 400 issues by hand for a popular legacy tool that we were actively telling folks not to use, nearly already on the day I started working on it. They were all so grateful to have someone reading over their issue and for the community goodwill it created, it was definitely worth it – for me. Different value systems and judgements may not make it so valuable. To be as direct as possible, I have 0 information on whether any of those grateful people were ever converted into paying customers of our company (and I like it that way.) Was it worth it in engineering dollars, or if you measured the output of the time spent reading each issue in terms of how it influenced directly on LOC output from my brain to my keyboard? Definitely not (at least not yet, short-term.) We kept the lights on, and the exit door illuminated, to demonstrate a commitment to support. In service of governance and long-term stability guarantees! Would we have gotten people off the boat faster if we had gone ahead and decided to pre-emptively close every issue that was not likely to get attended to, based on engineering effort/$$ calculations with low information about each issue? Very much possible. Some people may have also gotten alarmed and decided to swim from there, rather than trust our lifeboats to take them somewhere safer. See how stalebot provides value in this case, if "abandon ship" is the message you want to send ;) I may have made your (their) point even better for you, my point is simply different value judgements based on different calculus.
    - lucideer 4y ago
      > See how stalebot provides value in this case, if "abandon ship" is the message you want to send ;) Yes, that's great. Stalebot provides value for a project you want to kill. That's not what people use it for mostly though. If that's its purpose call it killbot. The point is not that stalebot is useless - I even said it sounds useful specifically for Jeff's use case. The point is that stale bot is actively harmful for the vast majority of uses in the wild: having a few rare cases of value doesn't change that.

by bouke 4y ago

yebyen 4y ago

Maintainers are great, and working open source projects are good, but not every project has an active maintainer, and it's my opinion that practically no one in Open Source signed up to be a "repo owner", unless they've gone to the trouble of developing some kind of governance structure to signal that they should be counted upon for support. That signal is an affirmative signal though, it's not implied. If you don't get a reply, and a robot closed your inquiry without comment then my guy, it seems that the signal has been sent clearly and received! If you disagree the fork button is in the upper right hand corner, you are the maintainer now! I don't mean this to be disrespectful, but there are a lot of open source projects supporting companies and the companies often don't contribute back in any way. So while I appreciate the PR, and I'm going to be as polite as possible before I close it, not everyone has time for that, and nobody owes it.

geerlingguy 4y ago
This, basically. And for probably 80% of issues, a maintainer might actually read the notification, but to click through, leave some sort of intelligent / honest reply, and either click close or reply and move on takes infinitely more time (when you're dealing with 100+ new issues and PRs a day) than not responding and moving to the next one. A non-response does signal one thing—the maintainer doesn't seem interested enough to touch the issue. Fork the project or maintain a patch separately if you need to, and move on.
lucideer 4y ago
I'm not the commenter, but I think you're misinterpreting the intent of the comment (or at the very least I interpreted it differently). > I expect at least some triaging from the maintainer before the stalebot comes in I didn't read this as "maintainers should always triage", I read this as "stalebot shouldn't axe issues unless maintainers are triaging" (see my original comment for why). One could reword the above comment for extra clarity/emphasis as: > I expect that before stalebot comes in [it should check whether] some triaging from the maintainer has been done] i.e. I don't think @bouke was shitting on maintainers, just on stale bot as a product. Of course maintainers should be under no obligation to do anything whatsoever: none of that is particularly relevant here when we're just discussing whether stale bot adds value. (I see Jeff has replied here too but also completely skipped over addressing criticisms of stale bot & focusing on the strawman of maintainer responsibility - which noone is debating)
- yebyen 4y ago
  I avoid stalebot for the reason you describe, because I want a maintainer to be reading and triaging issues, and I am in a job description where I can reasonably anticipate to be that person at least 40% of the time, even if I may not be coming through often enough (with a high batting average.) I'm really lucky to work for a company that can prioritize this type of interaction! But when maintainers are overextended or nobody is able to commit that way, I see the value of stalebot. I spent a year closing 400 issues by hand for a popular legacy tool that we were actively telling folks not to use, nearly already on the day I started working on it. They were all so grateful to have someone reading over their issue and for the community goodwill it created, it was definitely worth it – for me. Different value systems and judgements may not make it so valuable. To be as direct as possible, I have 0 information on whether any of those grateful people were ever converted into paying customers of our company (and I like it that way.) Was it worth it in engineering dollars, or if you measured the output of the time spent reading each issue in terms of how it influenced directly on LOC output from my brain to my keyboard? Definitely not (at least not yet, short-term.) We kept the lights on, and the exit door illuminated, to demonstrate a commitment to support. In service of governance and long-term stability guarantees! Would we have gotten people off the boat faster if we had gone ahead and decided to pre-emptively close every issue that was not likely to get attended to, based on engineering effort/$$ calculations with low information about each issue? Very much possible. Some people may have also gotten alarmed and decided to swim from there, rather than trust our lifeboats to take them somewhere safer. See how stalebot provides value in this case, if "abandon ship" is the message you want to send ;) I may have made your (their) point even better for you, my point is simply different value judgements based on different calculus.
  - lucideer 4y ago
    > See how stalebot provides value in this case, if "abandon ship" is the message you want to send ;) Yes, that's great. Stalebot provides value for a project you want to kill. That's not what people use it for mostly though. If that's its purpose call it killbot. The point is not that stalebot is useless - I even said it sounds useful specifically for Jeff's use case. The point is that stale bot is actively harmful for the vast majority of uses in the wild: having a few rare cases of value doesn't change that.