On 7/8/22 18:49, Todd Farmer wrote:
Hello,
The backlog of ARROW issues currently stands at 2585 open issues [1]. The
size of the backlog presents challenges to users and developers alike, and
I believe the project would benefit from establishing guidance around issue
handling. I'll be submitting a series of proposals for discussion,
including this one focusing specifically on assigned issues that have gone
dormant.
It's my belief that issue assignment implies the assignee is actively
working on a task, or intends to start working on it in short order. In
cases where well-intentioned developers are assigned tasks, but no progress
is reported for extended periods of time, I propose that we unassign the
issue and add a comment explaining why the action was taken. I believe any
assigned issue that has been idle for 90 days or more is a good threshold
to use, and that currently maps to 370 such issues [2], or 14% of the
current backlog. (Note: 153 of those have not been updated in the past
year.)
I would also like to expand the existing "Report bugs and propose features"
documentation [3] to cover issue handling in general, including the ask
that assigned issues be actively worked within the 90 day period or be
unassigned.
In summary, here are the actions I propose:
1. Establish a threshold at which assigned, idle issues should be
unassigned and comment added.
2. Define that threshold to be 90 days.
3. Document the above as a project policy for issue handling (PR against
docs)
4. Automate 1 and 2 above.
Thoughts on this?
[1]
https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20ARROW%20AND%20resolution%20%3D%20Unresolved
[2]
https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20ARROW%20AND%20resolution%20%3D%20Unresolved%20%20AND%20assignee%20IS%20NOT%20EMPTY%20AND%20updated%20%3C%20-90d
[3] https://arrow.apache.org/docs/developers/bug_reports.html
Best regards,
Todd Farmer
This seems reasonable. One might change the policy according to the
importance of an issue, with low priority issues given more time.
