UGUglyToad·Nov 30, 2022
Maybe (most likely) this is a problem of GitHub's terminology. For genuine bugs, e.g. here's the repro, the stack trace, the code to replicate it, it happens 100% of the time if you follow these steps, I'd agree that just having it open and in the backlog would be preferable.
The problem is those make up maybe at a generous estimate, 10-15% of issues in a projects backlog. In the interests of full disclosure here's mine (I don't use stalebot) https://github.com/UglyToad/PdfPig/issues?page=1&q=is%3Aissu.... As you can see from the backlog I close almost nothing. This was a deliberate choice to avoid closing things until the fix was confirmed by the reporter.
But equally that's the first time I've opened the repository in a couple of months and the amount of angst and dread I feel just from the size of that list means I'll probably find yet
Read the rest
another excuse not to do anything on it this coming month.
Discussions on this topic feel a lot like "technical solutions to social problems"; by which I mean "well in the ideal world a perfectly logical person would do x, y, z so the system should reflect that". And while a stalebot is the archetypal technical solution to a social problem it at least works with how maintainers work. Sometimes in life you want to ignore a problem and have it go away. When you can't do that, e.g. government bureaucracy, work stuff, social obligations, that's where stress comes from. And asking volunteer maintainers to add a whole new source of stress in their life falls apart when people get busy, or their life circumstances change, or they get ill or tired or whatever.
Yes, in a perfect world the issue backlog would be sacrosanct and perfectly groomed/prioritized. But we're just fleshy sacks of chemicals and we're not perfect. Unrealistic expectations from users are the cause of maintainer burnout.
Because GitHub closed issues are still viewable and searchable (I'd guess most people search it through a search engine not the terrible inbuilt search) I'd disagree that they're deceiving users somehow.