🌱 Use backlog and "help wanted" labels on issues/PRs to keep stale-bot away

[pnacht]

What kind of change does this PR introduce?

Tells the stale bot that issues/PRs labelled "never stale" shouldn't be considered stale.

• PR title follows the guidelines defined in our pull request documentation

What is the current behavior?

The stale bot will mark any issue or PR without activity as stale after some time. The exceptions are the issues and PRs with a few specific labels:

• issues: priority, bug and good first issue
• PRs: awaiting-approval and work-in-progress

However, there are other types of issues (and maybe PRs) that should remain open indefinitely: these may be more "philosophical" questions regarding Scorecard (i.e. #3549 and #2483) or "wishlist" feature requests that require changes in other places (i.e. #10).

What is the new behavior (if this is a feature change)?**

Issues and PRs can now be labelled as never stale. These issues will never be marked as stale or closed by the stale-bot. (A maintainer will still need to create these labels).

• Tests for the changes have been added (for bug fixes/features)

Which issue(s) this PR fixes

As discussed in #2761 (comment).

Special notes for your reviewer

Does this PR introduce a user-facing change?

For user-facing changes, please add a concise, human-readable release note to
the release-note

(In particular, describe what changes users might need to make in their
application as a result of this pull request.)

NONE

[codecov]

Codecov Report

Merging #3690 (6ad47ab) into main (3ce1daa) will decrease coverage by 7.40%.
The diff coverage is n/a.

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main    #3690      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   76.04%   68.65%   -7.40%     
==========================================
  Files         214      214              
  Lines       14803    14803              
==========================================
- Hits        11257    10163    -1094     
- Misses       2871     4035    +1164     
+ Partials      675      605      -70     

[spencerschrock]

Agree that having the author/interested party needing to constantly say "not stale" is bad. I think adding a generic not stale label is probably ok, but can see it being over-used and we would end up with a bunch of stale issues that are marked not stale.

So this seems like a triaging/process problem, and the issue should really reflect the current state. In the case of your linked issue (#2761), it has support from one of the maintainers. Maybe we should have a good idea or tentatively approved or something label, which gets exempted instead.

[raghavkaul]

My 2c: The existing categories describe issues well, but we could be better about tagging proactively.

[spencerschrock]

My 2c: The existing categories describe issues well, but we could be better about tagging proactively.

What label would you add to the issue in this case, and then to stale exemption list?

[raghavkaul]

Maybe I'd rename never stale to something like backlog or icebox to indicate that an issue is low priority but still in the consideration as a feature with widespread acceptance that it should be in Scorecard.

[pnacht]

Just pushed a change adopting icebox and help wanted, for anything the team would like to see but doesn't have time to implement itself.

Also removed the label from PRs because I can't really think of a use-case there that doesn't fit into the existing labels.

[spencerschrock]

Is icebox a common term? I personally think it's a bit cryptic compared to backlog

[raghavkaul]

Backlog is more commonly used, sounds fine with me.

[pnacht]

Ah, I used "icebox" due to @raghavkaul's suggestion. The term isn't as widely used as backlog, but it does exist.

Also, "backlog" is a fairly overloaded term, and in some definitions it's "this is what we ARE going to work on" (in agile, the tasks that will be performed during a sprint are the "backlog" or "sprint backlog"... there's also "work backlog" which is the lower priority stuff).

Another term I've often seen used is "backburner".

[spencerschrock]

Also, "backlog" is a fairly overloaded term, and in some definitions it's "this is what we ARE going to work on"

I think another aspect of confusion is who "we" is here. And my understanding is the issue is something we'd be fine with but want the community to pickup. Which sounds like "help wanted" (although we need to change the description as it's currently "Extra attention is needed")

So is "backlog" for maintainers to do, and "help wanted" for anyone/community to do?

[pnacht]

I think another aspect of confusion is who "we" is here. And my understanding is the issue is something we'd be fine with but want the community to pickup. Which sounds like "help wanted" (although we need to change the description as it's currently "Extra attention is needed")

So is "backlog" for maintainers to do, and "help wanted" for anyone/community to do?

That could be an option, yes. Basically:

• "backlog/icebox/backburner" = "stuff maintainers want to do but don't have time for right now, maybe we'll get to it in the future (or you can do it, that'd be awesome!)"
• "help wanted" = "stuff that'd be nice-to-have but is pretty low priority, maintainers likely will never do this themselves, but it'd be great if you could do it!"