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by dstroot 497 days ago
Codebase has >16k stars on GitHub and only 1 open issue, and 3 open PRs. Never seen that before on a highly used codebase. Kudos to the maintainer(s).
3 comments

I went through some of the issues to see how aggressively they close them and found this gem: https://github.com/ben-manes/caffeine/issues/1824#issuecomme...
Damn, I need that framed over my desk.
I haven't looked, but stalebot can make repos look squeaky clean when in reality issues are ignored and then closed without being addressed.
Sparing everyone else a browse of the bugtracker: the maintainer does not seem to use a bot to autoclose issues. The close issues appeared to be actually closed and it seemed from a quick glance that he actually investigated each filing.
Yep, no bots. A real bug not only means that I wasted someone else’s time, but reporting is a gift for an improvement. If a misunderstanding then it’s motivation that my project is used and deserves a generous reply. This perspective and treating as strictly a hobby, rather than as a criticism or demand for work, makes OSS feel more sustainable.
Google-Adjacent OSS repos are the worst for this!

Passive-Aggressive Stalebot marches into the middle of an _active_ thread and announces that the issue is now stale/dead and everyone should go away.

I get that on large projects there’s a non-trivial percentage of issues which amount to “I’m holding it wrong, didn’t actually read the log messages, or the manual, fix it for me pls” which are just unhelpful noise. However more often than not they take every other thread- including important ones, with them.

kitty is very close, which is impressive when you remember that the vast majority of the work is done by one guy (Kovid Goyal).

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues — 0.239% vs 0.137%

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues — 0.729% vs 0.317%

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/graphs/contributors