The stalebot is most times useless. The only scenario where I can see use of it is a maintainer waiting for the reporter to add information. But closing issues because no maintainer checked on them? That's garbage and discourages bug reports.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
164 points (95.6% liked)
Programmer Humor
19196 readers
879 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
But they get scared because their program has 500 bugs! Close them and now your program only has 10 bugs! Problem solved.
/s
absolute galaxy brain moment
They shouldn’t even be using the probot, it’s deprecated, unmaintained and thus potentially vulnerable
Also just the whole concept is wrong and encourages "me too" spam just to keep the thing from timing out and not being fixed.
I actually see a legitimate use case for it and helped add the actions version in a project where I'm a collaborator.
Quite a bit, certain bugs disappear after an update without us targeting it (partially because the logs get fudged a bit after going through dependencies, so sometimes multiple bugs have the same cause or it's actually a dependency issue that got fixed) and sometimes we forget about old feature requests.
The stale reminder doubles as a reminder for us to (re)consider working on the issue. When we know something probably isn't gonna get fixed suddenly, we apply a label to the issue. For enhancements that we'll definitely work on soon™, we apply help wanted. We've configured the action to ignore both. We also patrol notifications from stale to see if something shouldn't go stale. This is a medium-sized project so we can handle patrolling and IMO this helps us quite a bit.
Fair enough; I didn't consider artifacts like logs and traces. I suppose a stale marker might prompt the original reporter to retest and supply fresh ones (or confirm it's fixed in the dependency case).
In an ideal world I suppose we'd have automated tests for all bug reports but that's obviously never going to happen!
After a extremely long week, I sometimes participate in open source. I have to deal with malicious commits. I have to follow up on issues from misguided individuals who are actually looking for tech support. I have to guide new contributors to how this massive repo works and to submit tests. I have to negotiate with the core team and these convos can often last months/years.
And contributing to open-source is one of the few things that give me pleasure, even if it's a extremely thankless job.
But I'm tired man.
I'm not dealing with low-quality memers who are providing zero value. Nor should we encourage it.
I do FOSS as well, but I'd rather people have fun punting the stalebot than just keep repeating "this issue still exists". I will probably get a chuckle out of it.
I would argue that in this case the maintainers are in the wrong for not even responding to the issue, not the reporter responding with memes.