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by afdbcreid 78 days ago
I partially agree, but even with stalebots nobody is measuring the maintainers' productivity. So when they made the choice to use stalebots, they did that because they believe that's best for the project. It's different from corporate.
1 comments
what 78 days ago
Nobody is measuring their productivity, but people definitely look at how many open issues they have and potentially how long those issues have existed. They’re likely incentivized to close issues for appearances.
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necovek 78 days ago
With a popular open source project, you'll quickly get to a number of bug reports that you have no chance of ever solving. You will have to focus on the worst ones and ones affecting most users.

At the same time, you want to communicate to users that this is the case so they don't have wrong expectation. But also, psychologically it is demotivating to have a 1000+ open bugs queue with no capacity to re-triage and only two maintainers able to out a few fours in every month or every week.

In open source, "won't fix" means either "not in scope — feel free to fork" or "no capacity ever expected — feel free to provide a fix".

The optimization problem is how do you get the most out of very limited time from very few people, and having 1000+ open bugs that nobody can keep in their head or look for duplicates in is mentally draining and stops the devs from fixing even the top 3 bugs users do face.

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account42 77 days ago
The problem is that your users also have limited time and if it's clear you're not even looking at issues where someone has put in lots of effort to help you then you're only going to get lazy issues and it will actually take more effort from you to do all that work yourself if you want to reach the same software quality.
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necovek 77 days ago
I think you are missing the point: a user putting in a lot of effort into a bug report is usually trying to help themselves get the bug fixed.

As a maintainer, you will obviously look at that bug with more appreciation: but if you estimate it will take you 3 months of active development to fix it that you will have to spread over a full year of your weekends (which you can't afford), what would you do?

And what would a reasonable user rather see? Yes, this is an issue, but very hard to fix, and I don't have the time, or just letting the bug linger?

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