stale-bot: Make its message more instructive #92254
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ofborg
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6.topic: policy discussion
10.rebuild-darwin: 0
10.rebuild-linux: 0
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I looked a little at the stale bot code and it does not appear possible to have different messages for issues and PRs. |
The stale bot does appear to support separate messages (see the end of the first code block in this section) (or any other setting) for PRs and issues. Unless this example is lying? It'd look something like: pulls:
markComment: |
PR comment...
issues:
markComment: |
issue comment... |
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I think I wasn't looking closely enough! Thanks, @abathur. Edit: here's the relevant code: https://github.com/probot/stale/blob/32fdff543139290927502b0f696512902df3883a/lib/stale.js#L200 |
@ryantm @doronbehar I see some ways I think I can improve the style and structure of this message, but I want to avoid distracting from the more important task of deciding if this message says the right things. Just wanted to note that I'll try to be available to rephrase if either of you @ me. NixOS/rfcs#51 (comment) has a rough reference of how I'd be rephrasing. |
bhipple
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Thank you all for the reviews. Since we are taking this as the new PR stale message, I hope it's OK to suggest while at it a better message for issues? @abathur I took inspiration from your proposal at NixOS/rfcs#51 (comment) for the issues' message. In my last push, I addressed @bhipple and @Ma27's comments, and added this issues message: Hello, I'm a bot and I thank you in the name of the community for opening this issue. To help our human contributors focus on the most-relevant reports, I check up on old issues to see if they're still relevant. This issue has had no activity for 180 days, and so I marked it as stale, but you can rest assured it will never be closed by a non-human. The community will appreciate your effort, if you'd recheck the issue, and hopefully close it if you see it is no longer valid. If the issue persists, and you'd like to remove the stale label, you simply need to leave a comment. Your comment can be as simple as "still important to me". If you'd like it to get more attention, you can ask for help by searching for maintainers and people that previously touched related code and @ mention them in a comment. You can use Git blame or GitHub's web interface on the relevant files to find them. Lastly, you can always ask for help at our Discourse Forum or at #nixos' IRC channel. |
As somewhat discussed at: https://git.io/JJkRa, make the bot's message a bit more instructive, and clearer as for what it will and won't do, so random contributors will have a better idea what this is about. Also: Split stale issues' and PRs' messages because each should suggest different actions to do.
Motivation for this change
Address the comments the stale bot got at NixOS/rfcs#51 after it's deployment.
I know the stale bot is using the same message for both issues and PRs. My suggestion improve the bot's message for PRs, and it's not suitable for issues. I hope it's possible to configure a different message for PRs vs issues and I think we can't find a single message that will fit both cases. This message is also longer, but I think it explains better what's the situation and it gives better suggestions as to what can be done. Also, it gives less of an impression that it's the PR's author's fault that their PR was marked as stale. Other improvements include the bot saying that it won't close the PR, along with a fix to the link to IRC (I'm not sure if it was rendered as expected before :/).
EDIT: I removed the copy of it rendered as it will change often now along with reviews.