Stale Branch, Issue, and PR cleanup

[n2p5]

Description

We need to do some spring cleaning for 2025 and before our beta launch. This is a call to action for a multi-phase cleanup effort between individuals and in the group. Right now there is a significant cognitive load when trying to see how we work and prioritize Issues and Pull Requests with so many items left in an open state.

gnolang/gno has many open Branches, Issues, and PRs:

• 82 branches
• 561 Issues
• 232 Pull Requests

Proposal

Phase 1 - Personal Cleanup

Each contributor should review Branches, Issues, and PRs owned by them. They should remove anything that has been abandoned, or things that will not be worked on. Before closing Issues or PR, please update with your reasons why you are closing it out.

Phase 2 - Engagement Cleanup

The second category is to review Issues and Pull Requests you've been involved with. If you have interacted with, or have been assigned to as a reviewer, please review these items. This can include abandoned work by contributors who are no longer involved. These items might require greater discussion, but please take owner-ship of getting feedback fro the original item owner, if possible. Work to add context as needed and close items that are no longer relevant.

Phase 3 - Stale Item Bash

Think of it as a "bug bash", where we get a critical mass of contributors together to review open items "oldest to newest". Here we quickly review, add context, and close item items that are no longer serving us well. This should be scheduled and run before we go-live. Ideally this should happen before Jan 24th.

Feedback and Amendments

If you have feedback or requested changes to this proposal, please chime in below.

[thehowl]

For the branches, we should encourage all contributors (including core) to make PRs from their personal accounts; and hopefully remove all branches on the repository (and forbid creating them) with the exception for those already created.

For issues/PRs, we implemented stale bot partly with the intention of helping us find issues that can be closed because they are not planned, or no-one is willing to invest time in them. It has already closed a few and I think we'll see more PRs being closed over time.

[n2p5]

Yeah, I was aware that we have a bot in place, but if you go way back on issues and PRs, some go back to 2022, etc. I still think that the owners and stakeholders would know best on whether efforts are still in-flight or if something really should be abandoned. I still think its worth a manuel review for Phase 1 and Phase 2, personally.

[mdqst]

Hey team, I noticed you have a ton of pull requests coming in—do you need any help managing them?
Let me know if there's anything I can assist with!