jan kili (Oct 09 2022 at 01:36): jan kili (Oct 09 2022 at 01:36):It's been a few months since I last asked (somwhere, can't find it) - how healthy does our repo look to you?
jan kili (Oct 09 2022 at 01:36):I think it looks well-organized, active, and friendly :)
jan kili (Oct 09 2022 at 01:37):The only thing that stands out to me as a yellow flag is our open issue count.
Issues: 664 open / 781 closed :thinking:
PRs: 43 open / 2,773 closed :smiley:
jan kili (Oct 09 2022 at 01:38):Time-wise, here's when those open issues are from:
0 open issues from 2019 or earlier
65 open issues from 2020
239 open issues from 2021
371 open issues from 2022
jan kili (Oct 09 2022 at 01:39):What do you think about these metrics - is that too many open issues? Is it intimidating to newcomers, or looking unmaintained? We definitely keep old good issues around for project management purposes, which is valid.
jan kili (Oct 09 2022 at 01:40):The "appearance of maintenance" aspect is more important in the future when we come out of "work in progress" phase into "v0.1" phase, but I'm just curious to hear opinions on its current state.
jan kili (Oct 09 2022 at 01:42):(also, completely coincidentally, our open issue count is equal to the issue # for one of our biggest open issues, and that makes me very happy haha)
Screenshot-from-2022-10-08-19-41-38.png
Anton (Oct 09 2022 at 10:58):Lots of popular open source projects have a massive amount of open issues so that's not something I'd be worried about. I often don't create an issue when I implement or fix things, we could try to do that more to improve the open/closed ratio.
Brian Hicks (Oct 10 2022 at 14:23):Whenever I’m trying to determine liveness of a project I look at the time of the last couple commits. Issues don’t bother me at all unless it’s obvious that things are never ever being closed out (e.g. Quill)
Brian Hicks (Oct 10 2022 at 14:24):it seems like we have a growing community and a corresponding growing issue count. Fine with me!
jan kili (Oct 10 2022 at 14:27):Great perspectives, sounds like our issue count/ratio is fine!
jan kili (Oct 10 2022 at 14:28):For PRs & branches I've been tidying/reviving when they get older than 6-9months
jan kili (Oct 10 2022 at 14:29):Do we want a soft limit on issue age? Maybe 2 years?
Brian Hicks (Oct 10 2022 at 14:29):what problem would that solve?
Brian Hicks (Oct 10 2022 at 14:30):if we didn’t address an issue in two years we’d just get people saying “hey, what was the solution here?”
Brian Hicks (Oct 10 2022 at 14:30):if the answer is “we got tired of it being open”, I think that’d be a worse signal than a big open count
Brian Hicks (Oct 10 2022 at 14:33):if stuff is truly stale we can have some bot take care of pings and closing. There are a few to choose from, IIRC
Brian Hicks (Oct 10 2022 at 14:33):but I kinda think it’d be putting the cat in front of the horse at this stage
Brian Hicks (Oct 10 2022 at 14:33):(haaaaaah what a good typo. I love it and I’m leaving it. On mobile this morning.)
Chris Duncan (Oct 10 2022 at 16:16):There's already a workflow for stale PRs, so one for stale issues wouldn't be a stretch.
Brendan Hansknecht (Oct 10 2022 at 17:40):I think it is good to ping old issues at some sort of cadence. Generally there are three reasons an issue is old:
1) something that is future planned work but with a long time horizon
2) something obsolete that never got closed
3) an issue were we are waiting on a reply from someone and can't continue work without it.
For 2 and 3, it would be good to ping stale issue and eventually auto close them.
For 1, it is fine if the issue gets pinged (though a tad annoying if it bloats the thread), but we definitely don't want them to close.
Chris Duncan (Oct 10 2022 at 20:25):We can have a bot ignore issues with certain characteristics like label. That way we can differentiate 1) from 2) and 3).
Last updated: Jun 16 2026 at 16:19 UTC