Hey everyone!
Today I opened an issue on the website GitHub repo (Clean up Django tracker by a bot · Issue #200 · django/code.djangoproject.com · GitHub) discussing the need for clean-up the django’s tickets. As a contributor, I don’t like to open tickets one by one and sometimes face tickets that are not assigned, have PRs, some that PRs need improvement/test/doc aren’t marked as such, and some tickets aren’t de-assigned even though their owner hasn’t had any activity for a long time and so on. We can have solutions to address this issue and I think it’s not a big deal to have a bot to at least address some of these issues.
So, first, do you feel the same way that I feel? Do you think tickets need maintenance, and second if you feel the same, let’s discuss the solution. I propose an external bot to handle syncing between the Django tickets website and GitHub.
In addition to the issue you referenced along with its related comments, you might also want to read the complete thread at Automatically marking stale PRs as such where something along these lines was discussed, and the referenced related mailing list thread at https://groups.google.com/g/django-developers/c/RAGuVJhT_3M/m/i2h1k-U-AAAJ
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On one occasion a few years ago I did sweep through most of the open PRs and either check a missing “Has Patch” or “Patch Needs Improvement” flag, or leaving a comment for the author if I wasn’t sure, asking them to choose the best course of action. So although I don’t want to deny that there is some cleanup that is needed from time to time, the need seems too occasional to me to justify effort. A bot is unlikely to be able to assess whether a new review is needed, but it could do things you suggest like de-assigning tickets after X weeks of no activity. However, the contribution guidelines already suggest that after a ping and a polite wait, any ticket is fair game. I would advise a new contributor not to be discouraged by the existence of an assignee.
As a contributor, I don’t like to open tickets one by one and sometimes face tickets that are not assigned, have PRs
It’s a good thing when there’s a previous stalled PR: you can learn from the feedback and thereby get your own PR a little closer to the hoop. I’ve done this a few times myself.
If you have a recent example of feeling discouraged when working with the ticket tracker, it would help to know about it in more detail to help assess your proposal.
I’d like to have more contributors on board on this issue. I, personally, feel it’s worth having a clean-up (even for once for now), especially, when I feel like it seems we’ve tweaked Trac before and added the Pull Requests field. Basically, when there is a merged pull request, the “patch needs improvement/test/doc” should be automatically unset if is set already. There are several of these kinda issues that we may just agree on and some of them get resolved.
For example:
https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/28594