Some types of the issues do not “rot”. While bug reports sometimes do, feature requests and enhancements proposals rarely do. I suggest that Stale bot should at least ignore those (e.g. it can ignore “enhancement”), or, better, apply its annoying poking to only “bug” labels: Labels · ocaml/ocaml · GitHub
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I would say the opposite.
Bugs rarely disappear and it’s useful to document them somewhere.
IMO feature requests stop making sense over time (eg. it didn’t convince a lot of people, original interest is lost).
I disagree with this vision of the stale bot: from my point of view, the stale bot is here to help triaging and archiving of issues.
In this sense, feature requests and enhancement proposals that have not gathered any feedback for years are the prime target of the stale bot for archiving purpose.
Contrarily, bugs should never be archived and should be rather be ignored by the stale bot.
One important point to keep in mind is that neither Github issues nor the stale bot really fits the preferred semantics for issues of anyone that I know: it is a bad approximation which is considered better than nothing by the compiler maintainers by a thin margin.
The problem of what the semantics of issues seem quite widespread, typically the famous GitHub stale bot considered harmful blog post states that
If so, this might stem from a misunderstanding of the responsibilities a maintainer has to their project. You are not obligated to respond to every issue, implement every feature request, or fix every bug, or even acknowledge them in any way.
However, I am sorry to say that this runs in opposition to my vision of a bug tracker. I don’t want to not care about the issues of the bug tracker and let the bug tracker be a black hole for user complaints.
Personally, I would love to have a finer distinction between active, archived, won't fix and solved issues rather than just open or closed issues. Similarly, I would rather have a “remainder and triaging” bot that send remainder for bugs and proposals for archiving on feature requests after a year of inactivity.
That’s not the interface that we have access to unfortunately, and no one has yet to find the time to improve this specific pain point, so the compiler maintainers are stuck with doing manual course correction on the top of the stale bot.
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