Stream: contributing

Topic: Cleaning up GitHub Labels


view this post on Zulip Sky Rose (Nov 24 2024 at 04:13):

I just finished #contributing > Cleaning up GitHub Issues , and based on that, I have some recommendations on ways to clean up the labels in GitHub. The list of labels is pretty long, so cleaning it up could make easier to navigate the list, see more useful labels, and keep things tagged consistently. The triage role doesn't give me permission to edit labels in the repo, so this would fall on someone who does have that permission.

Recommend deleting:

These ones are pretty useless, just taking up space.

Consider deleting

Not quite as slam dunk to delete, but if you want to get more aggressive in shortening the list of labels, these would be good candidates.

Recommend adding/editing descriptions for:

Better descriptions would make it more likely that labels are used consistently.

Consider new labels:

I saw a lot of issues related to these topics. New labels for them could be helpful:

view this post on Zulip Richard Feldman (Nov 24 2024 at 04:44):

wowww, thank you so much for doing this!!! :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes:

view this post on Zulip Richard Feldman (Nov 24 2024 at 04:45):

maybe the testing label could become roc test for clarity?

view this post on Zulip Richard Feldman (Nov 24 2024 at 04:45):

I think reporting could be merged into error-messages

view this post on Zulip Luke Boswell (Nov 24 2024 at 04:45):

I'm happy to update the labels, the reccomend ones look good. I dont know if they need much discussion.

view this post on Zulip Luke Boswell (Nov 24 2024 at 06:52):

What's the difference between reporting and error messages? I think I prefer error messages as that is clearer

view this post on Zulip Sky Rose (Nov 24 2024 at 14:46):

In theory I like merging error-messages and reporting, but GitHub doesn't have a way to merge labels. Deleting a label irreversibly removes the label from all its issues. You'd have to go through every issue with one of the labels to tag them with the other label, before deleting it.

reporting has 33 open issues and PRs and 24 closed. So it wouldn't be too hard to change them all manually. (error-messages has 80 open and 15 closed.)

If you didn't want to change them manually, this would be silly, but you could rename reporting to like error-messages-2 "Also error messages, here for historical reasons".

view this post on Zulip shua (Nov 25 2024 at 22:40):

There's a gh cli tool you can use locally to make listing and relabeling issues slightly less manual: https://cli.github.com/manual/gh_issue .

here's an example to list first 50 issues with "reporting" label, and generate commands for each one to add the "error-messages" label

gh issue list -R roc-lang/roc -L 50 -l reporting | cut -f1 | sed 's/.*/gh issue edit & -R roc-lang\/roc --add-label "error-messages"/' >relabel.sh

then check relabel.sh, and run it if it looks right. I like to split up the generate/run steps because it's too easy for this kind of thing to turn into "oops, I relabelled all 9000+ issues"


Last updated: Jul 06 2025 at 12:14 UTC