The release team currently conducts does both issue and PR triage. As part of this, we’re also attempting to maintain the “State of Rust” view. Especially the State of Rust board is difficult to maintain with our current resources and methods, as it requires somewhat rare but relatively difficult investment by triagers.
My hope is to develop some form of automation – or at least “triage assistance” – that would enable us to more easily expand our current set of triagers.
I believe there’s two primary components to this.
The highest-order bit is a “triaged” label – though likely not actually a label – that could be set by anyone (not necessarily on the release team) doing triage. The idea here is that for the majority of issues, there’s no reason to visit them (unless there are direct comments) more than about once a month at most. Currently, there’s no good way without ‘touching’ the issue (e.g., label changes) to update the ‘visited’ date. That makes triage difficult, unless one always visits all issues – something that is pretty much not possible at this point.
The idea here is that there will be a central “board” of some kind – likely a website – that allows people to triage issues whether they’re part of the Rust teams or not. We might want some kind of permissions system, but it seems plausible that bad actors are somewhat unlikely.
The thought here is that instead of needing to grant people “write” access to rust-lang/rust in order for them to close/tag issues, we would give them the ability to do so from the website UI. I think basically close and label are all that’s needed.
We may want to consider some form of integration with rfcbot such that closing issues can be done via team consensus, but proposed by someone outside the team.
The second part of this, beyond this triaged/not yet triaged board, is a better way to maintain the State of Rust board. I think this will be helped by the triage board – we can have a separate one for tracking issues.
The general problem of increasing the amount or quality of triage to ensure discovery and surfacing of issues (and PRs) is one that the release team will be discussing at the upcoming all hands.