To me, it's the same as the point of closing old PRs, which is (1) to automatically "bump" in any dormant issue -- the stalebot will comment 2 weeks before closing, giving anyone an opportunity to state that it's still relevant and bring it back to the forefront for re-consideration; (2) to automatically close any issues that nobody wants to speak up for -- we have a large number of issues that are no longer relevant, but just aren't getting closed since nobody scrubs them. The effect should be giving us an open issues list that more accurately respects the issues that people in the community feel are important.
The stalebot documentation itself (https://github.com/probot/stale) has a good justification: > In an ideal world with infinite resources, there would be no need for this app. > > But in any successful software project, there's always more work to do than people to do it. As more and more work piles up, it becomes paralyzing. Just making decisions about what work should and shouldn't get done can exhaust all available resources. In the experience of the maintainers of this app—and the hundreds of other projects and organizations that use it—focusing on issues that are actively affecting humans is an effective method for prioritizing work. > > To some, a robot trying to close stale issues may seem inhospitable or offensive to contributors. But the alternative is to disrespect them by setting false expectations and implicitly ignoring their work. This app makes it explicit: if work is not progressing, then it's stale. A comment is all it takes to keep the conversation alive. On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 7:57 AM Roman Leventov <leventov...@gmail.com> wrote: > What's the purpose of closing old issues? How does it make the Druid > development experience better? > > On Thu, 20 Jun 2019 at 23:54, Gian Merlino <g...@apache.org> wrote: > > > By the way, I do think it makes sense to have a stalebot for issues. > Right > > now we have over 1000 open issues and I doubt anyone is actively > reviewing > > them. IMO it would be better to keep the list shorter, to things where > the > > original filer is still actively interested in keeping them alive. But I > > think 60 days is a bit short, hence the suggestion in my follow up PR to > > raise it to 280 days (about 3 release cycles). > > > > On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 12:40 PM Gian Merlino <g...@apache.org> wrote: > > > > > There's been some discussion on GitHub about enabling stalebot (which > we > > > use for PRs) for issues as well. Please check this PR out if you are > > > interested: https://github.com/apache/incubator-druid/pull/7936. It's > a > > > follow up to https://github.com/apache/incubator-druid/pull/7927, > which > > > is also recent. > > > > > >
