Closing issues

[tueda]

Currently, we have many open issues. Some of them are no longer relevant or remain open because it is unclear whether the reported problems have been resolved. These issues can create maintenance overhead.

To help clean up these issues, we could add a workflow using actions/stale to notify issue participants that an inactive issue may be closed if there is no further activity. For example:

.github/workflows/stale.yml:

name: Close stale issues
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '30 0 * * *'  # daily
  workflow_dispatch:

permissions:
  issues: write

jobs:
  stale:
    runs-on: ubuntu-slim
    steps:
      - uses: actions/stale@v8
        with:
          days-before-issue-stale: 210
          days-before-pr-stale: -1
          days-before-issue-close: 30
          days-before-pr-close: -1
          stale-issue-message: >
            This issue has been marked as stale after 210 days of inactivity.
            It will be closed automatically in 30 days unless there is any further activity.
            If this issue is still relevant, please leave a comment to keep it open.
          stale-issue-label: stale
          exempt-issue-labels: bug,documentation,enhancement,help wanted,needs decision
          operations-per-run: 15  # Keep stale operations low for now.
          exempt-all-issue-milestones: true

Similar stale workflows can be found in popular project, such as:

• https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg/blob/master/.github/workflows/stale.yml
• https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/.github/workflows/stale.yml
• https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/blob/main/.github/workflows/stale.yml

The exact time thresholds (210 + 30 days) can be adjusted. In the example above, operations-per-run is kept low to avoid sending too many notifications at once.

Any thoughts?

In addition, we may add the following new labels:

Label: stale
Description: No recent activity. This may be closed if there is no further activity.

Label: needs more info
Description: More information from the reporter is needed to investigate this issue.

Label: needs decision
Description: A decision on the intended behaviour is needed before this can move forward.

needs more info can be used to indicate that we need additional details from the reporter. It is similar to GitHub's default question label.

needs decision can be used for issues where FORM's intended behaviour is unclear. This label can help prevent such issues from being marked as stale until the intended behaviour is clarified.

[tueda]

As for labels, maybe we could also add one similar to good first issue, but reserved for workshop exercises:

Label: reserved for workshop
Description: Reserved for workshop exercises. Please leave this issue for workshop participants. PRs from others may be closed.

[tueda]

The stale workflow was implemented in #853 and has been merged.

The workflow is expected to remove the stale label from stale issues when a new comment or an exempt label is added. But it isn't doing that yet because of the cap on operations-per-run, so it still hasn't completed a full pass over all issues.

Before any stale issue reaches the 30-day auto-close threshold, we should consider one of the following:

1. Manually remove the stale label from issues that have received new comments or exempt labels.
2. Manually run the workflow several times, though this would send many stale-notification emails in a short period.
3. Add a separate job that only handles removing the stale label, with a higher operations-per-run value.

[tueda]

I think it would be better to convert some stale issues into discussions or recreate them as new discussions. These include:

• Syntax highlighting for FORM #320 → 💬 General or 💡 Ideas
• Populate the FORM Cookbook #409 → 💬 General or 💡 Ideas
• Fuzzing with afl++ #663 → 💡 Ideas
• Using color.h to simplify products of T-matrices with open fundamental indices #755 → 🙏 Q&A