Hi all,

This thread complements the ongoing discussion about migrating to GitHub 
Issues, but is worth pursuing regardless of how that ends.

I have raised the idea of a major JIRA cleanup several times before. The usual 
pushback is that important work or still-reproducible bugs would be lost 
forever. I understand the concern, but I think the current situation has become 
untenable: the median age of an open JIRA is 8.4 years. That number does not 
reflect what anyone is actually working on — it reflects years of accumulated 
noise that makes the tracker harder to navigate for everyone.

I used an LLM to analyse all 4,093 currently open issues and put together a 
short report. It took about five minutes and surfaces some useful data. The 
full report is here:

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/81fe75ce-e387-4b88-81fb-d4fc8b90a1a9

A few highlights from the data:
- 84% of open issues have not been touched in over 2 years
- 34% have zero comments — filed and never discussed
- 70% have no assignee

Select graphs are included below (if they don't make it through the list, see 
HTML link above)

The report suggests a three-tier approach:

* Tier 1 — Close now (~1,200 issues): Zero comments AND no update in 3+ years. 
Bulk-close with a label such as "housekeeping-2026" so nothing is permanently 
lost.
* Tier 2 — Triage with LLM assistance (~2,200 issues): No update in 2+ years, 
possibly some comments. Review in batches and close obvious candidates with the 
same label.
* Tier 3 — Keep and triage properly (~700 issues): Updated within the last 2 
years, or has votes or active comments. These deserve real attention.

Does the community agree that something needs to be done? I am happy to help 
coordinate the effort if there is appetite for it.

Jan



---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]

Reply via email to