This idea appeared in a twitter thread: https://twitter.com/Gankro/status/1144041406404661248. I did a quick search here and could not found anything relevant to the matter (please forgive me if this has already been discussed).
Anyway I think it would be nice to have a bot in github to close old issues in the rust-lang repos that are no longer relevant in two steps: First a warning, and then closing it if no one answered to the warning. I don’t know if this could be done (or it is already done and I am missing it) by any of the existing bots.
If you consider this is a good idea I’d be more than happy to work on it
We used stale bot in the Cargo tracker for a while. It generally made people upset and caused too much disruption, so we stopped using it. I would not recommend using a bot to close issues.
how do we differentiate between which issues are relevant and which are not? A lot of issues opened a few years back are still valid today.
People take time to reply. Even though our triage work is based that many times we do make exceptions or wait for a week or 2.
When you ping an author, it might be difficult for them to ascertain whether an issue is still valid. Many times they might not be using the code or have a smaller example ready.
I believe that there should be the option to ignore issues by telling the bot to do it in a comment.
We could try to use longer time periods between warning and closing the issue.
About pinging the author I have mixed feelings, if the author needs more time to decide maybe there should be a way to extend a little bit the lifetime of the issue (maybe to two time periods?).
