This was almost 10 months in the making, with 2 attempts and coming back from the PR being closed by Stalebot multiple times. So glad it’s finally done.
One more argument for leaving GitHub! I haven’t seen stale bots on any of the FOSS code forges yet, and maybe we can build a culture that has better ways of dealing with the (entirely valid) problems of overwhelmed and demotivated maintainers.
They are a necessary evil, especially for a project like Serenity.
People love to invent, or port a feature or some grand refactoring, and then they get tired of it and leave their work to rot forever. The serenity stale bot as closed ~500 PRs over it’s life time that were left with no activity for over a month.
In my opinion, pull requests that are not ready for review (i.e. drafts or failing CI checks), are fair game to be closed as stale. However, bug reports, feature requests, and PRs that pass CI checks should remain open until they get attention from a maintainer.
I totally agree with that. We explicitly don’t enable stale bot for any issues, only PRs. There have been cases where PRs slipped through the cracks in SerenityOS and stale bot happened to close them. It’s just one click to bring them back and get them merged, so it always seemed like a reasonable trade-off to me. The community is generally watching for what stale bot reaps and have been good about raising anything that should be given attention.
This was almost 10 months in the making, with 2 attempts and coming back from the PR being closed by Stalebot multiple times. So glad it’s finally done.
I hate stale bots so much. They generate way too much noise and make it hard to work on larger, longer features.
Exactly. Make use of sorting/filters/labels instead.
One more argument for leaving GitHub! I haven’t seen stale bots on any of the FOSS code forges yet, and maybe we can build a culture that has better ways of dealing with the (entirely valid) problems of overwhelmed and demotivated maintainers.
They are a necessary evil, especially for a project like Serenity. People love to invent, or port a feature or some grand refactoring, and then they get tired of it and leave their work to rot forever. The serenity stale bot as closed ~500 PRs over it’s life time that were left with no activity for over a month.
In my opinion, pull requests that are not ready for review (i.e. drafts or failing CI checks), are fair game to be closed as stale. However, bug reports, feature requests, and PRs that pass CI checks should remain open until they get attention from a maintainer.
I totally agree with that. We explicitly don’t enable stale bot for any issues, only PRs. There have been cases where PRs slipped through the cracks in SerenityOS and stale bot happened to close them. It’s just one click to bring them back and get them merged, so it always seemed like a reasonable trade-off to me. The community is generally watching for what stale bot reaps and have been good about raising anything that should be given attention.
Then you have a good community and I’m glad that it works for you. A wasteland of open-but-stale stuff is no fun to wade through.
Corresponding blog post (I didn’t make the connection until Andreas pointed it out just now) is https://sin-ack.github.io/posts/sycl-talk-20221007/.
Here is the Lobsters discussion for that post