Slightly off-topic, but or helping to clear the PR review backlog, I have a 
proposal to add some “PR lifecycle” tools to spark-prs.appspot.com to make it 
easier to track which PRs are blocked on reviewers vs. authors: 
https://github.com/databricks/spark-pr-dashboard/pull/39


On December 18, 2014 at 2:01:31 PM, Sean Owen (so...@cloudera.com) wrote:

In practice, most issues with no activity for, say, 6+ months are  
dead. There's down-side in believing they will eventually get done by  
somebody, since they almost always don't.  

Most is clutter, but if there are important bugs among them, then the  
fact they're idling is a different problem: too much demand / not  
enough supply of attention, not saying 'no' to enough, fast enough,  
and so on.  

Sure you can prompt people to at least ping an issue they care about  
once every 6 months to keep it alive. Which is essentially the same  
as: Resolve and invite anyone who cares to Reopen. If nobody bothers,  
can it be important? If the problem is, well, nobody would really be  
paying attention to the prompts, that's this different problem again.  

So: I think the auto-Resolve idea, or an email blast, is at best a  
forcing mechanism to pay attention to a more fundamental issue. I  
myself am less interested in that than working on the causes of  
long-lived important stuff in a JIRA backlog.  

You can see regular process progress like auto-closing PRs,  
spark-prs.appspot.com, some big passes at closing stale issues. It's  
still my impression that the bulk of existing JIRA does not get  
reviewed, so there's more to do. For example, from a recent tour  
through the JIRA list, there were ~50 that were even definitively  
resolved, and not marked as such. It's not for lack of excellent  
effort. The pace of good change outstrips any other project I've seen  
by a wide margin, dwarfed only by unprecedented inbound load.  

I'd rather the conversation be about more attacks on the supply/demand  
problem, like adding committers to offload resolution of the easy and  
clear changes more rapidly, docs or tools to help contributors make  
better PRs/JIRAs in the first place, stating what is in and out of  
scope upfront to direct efforts, and so on. That's a different  
discussion from this one though.  


On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 8:07 PM, Josh Rosen <rosenvi...@gmail.com> wrote:  
> I don’t think that it makes sense to just close inactive JIRA issue without 
> any human review. There are many legitimate feature requests / bug reports 
> that might be inactive for a long time because they’re low priorities to fix 
> or because nobody has had time to deal with them yet.  
>  
> On December 15, 2014 at 2:37:30 PM, Nicholas Chammas 
> (nicholas.cham...@gmail.com) wrote:  
>  
> OK, that's good.  
>  
> Another approach we can take to controlling the number of stale JIRA issues  
> is writing a bot that simply closes issues after N days of inactivity and  
> prompts people to reopen the issue if it's still valid. I believe Sean Owen  
> proposed that at one point (?).  
>  
> I wonder if that might be better since I feel that even a slimmed down  
> email might not be enough to get already-busy people to spend time on JIRA  
> management.  
>  
> Nick  
>  

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