Stream: contributing

Topic: Cleaning up GitHub Issues


view this post on Zulip Sky Rose (Nov 01 2024 at 21:44):

I've been thinking about going through the GitHub issues and trying to close a bunch of them out. Most recently inspired by this idea to keep down the number of issues, but I've been tempted to do this for a while.

Here's my plan:

I'm hoping to spend a few hours on it this weekend, and close out a couple hundred issues. The issues will still be a mess when I'm done, but a little bit less of a mess.

Things I won't do:

About me
I've been a long-time lurker in Zulip. I haven't made any code contributions (yet) but I think I can contribute better with this chore than I could by writing code. I'm not an expert, which will limit my ability to judge some issues, but I'm familiar enough with Roc's plans to clear out some of them.

Why do this:

Would this be a useful way to contribute? If so, here's what I need from core maintainers before I can start:

view this post on Zulip Sam Mohr (Nov 01 2024 at 23:34):

This would be extremely helpful IMO! I don't think I'm the person with the launch codes for this operation, but if I did, I'd give the go ahead

view this post on Zulip Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 01 2024 at 23:51):

I'm a bit nervous of the idea, but I think it would be by far be more useful than problematic

view this post on Zulip Anton (Nov 02 2024 at 12:41):

@Sky Rose thanks for helping out :heart:
I've given you the triage role, unfortunately it does not allow for editing of label descriptions and github does not appear to support giving someone granular permissions. So feel free to tell me which label descriptions should be changed.

view this post on Zulip Anton (Nov 02 2024 at 12:42):

Your blessing to embark on this before I send people 1000 GitHub notifications.

Let's start slow so it's easy to give feedback on your approach :)

view this post on Zulip Sky Rose (Nov 03 2024 at 03:18):

In the spirit of starting slow, here's an update after my first small batch:

I went through 69 issues, numbered 6133-6328, which is all open issues from December 2023. (I started in the middle because I that seemed more helpful than starting at the newest or oldest issues.)

I closed 13 issues and brought the number of unlabeled issues down from 418 to 368. That's not the smashing success I was hoping for, but it's still something, and I'm planning to continue.

There were a lot of issues where all I could do was tag it as a bug and move on, but nearly every bug has a reproduction. I expect that a lot of those bugs have been fixed over time (intentionally or accidentally), and if I were checking if the reproductions still worked, then I could close a lot more issues. But that would slow things down quite a bit. I think I want to continue with the current approach, and then consider doing a second pass to check the reproductions.

view this post on Zulip Sam Mohr (Nov 03 2024 at 03:43):

Yeah, double checking reproductions should be fine for a second pass

view this post on Zulip Luke Boswell (Nov 03 2024 at 21:19):

Thanks for all the work on these issues Sky... looking good :+1:

view this post on Zulip Sky Rose (Nov 05 2024 at 03:13):

Update:

I just finished going through all of 2023 (341 issues).
I started at 1160 issues, and am now at 1128 issues, which is 32 issues closed. (+1 issue opened, -1 issue closed by someone else).
There were 418 unlabeled issues to start with, and now there are 277, 42 of which are issues from 2023 that I looked at and couldn't categorize.
I've spent 9 hours going through issues (plus some time getting set up).

I consider this to be going pretty well. I won't extrapolate to what the numbers will be like when I'm done, cuz the older stuff is gonna be so much different than what I've done so far. I'm thinking next time I work on this, I'll close the 65 editor issues for an easy win, and then skip 2022 (328 issues) and go to 2021 (203 issues).

view this post on Zulip Anton (Nov 05 2024 at 09:44):

I've spent 9 hours going through issues (plus some time getting set up).

Wow, thank you very much @Sky Rose!

view this post on Zulip Richard Feldman (Nov 05 2024 at 12:52):

yeah, that's amazing - thank you so much, @Sky Rose! :heart_eyes:

view this post on Zulip Sky Rose (Nov 24 2024 at 04:14):

I'm done! I've reviewed more than a thousand issues from February 2020 through July 2024. The number of issues is down from 1160 to 963 which is 197 or 17% of issues closed. And I've labeled and cross-linked a lot of the issues that are still open. I'm satisfied with this outcome.

There are a few followup tasks that could be done. In decreasing order of being a good use of time:

None of these are particularly urgent, they're just cleanup chores, and I know there's a ton of more urgent stuff going on with purity inference being released and AoC. Let me know if you want me to make issues for any of these or bring it up again at a less busy time.

Now the fun stats:

Before (2024-11-02) After (2024-11-23)
Last Issue/PR # 7193 7244
Open Issues 1160 963
Closed Issues 1460 1670
Total Issues 2620 2633
Unlabeled Issues 418 95
2020 Open Issues 46 36
2021 Open Issues 203 120
2022 Open Issues 328 273
2023 Open Issues 341 305
2024 Open Issues 242 229

view this post on Zulip Isaac Van Doren (Dec 01 2024 at 03:35):

I'm happy to try the reproductions on some bugs, but not going to commit to all 400 :sweat_smile:. I'll start with the oldest first and leave a comment explaining why the issue can be closed or should be kept open if I check it. There are some (compiler internals) that I don't have enough context on to be able to tell if they are still relevant so I'll leave them alone. Let me know if you have any concerns with this approach.

view this post on Zulip Luke Boswell (Dec 01 2024 at 04:17):

This is ideal. We all chip away at it and we'll get there. Little steps :baby_chick:


Last updated: Jul 06 2025 at 12:14 UTC