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Add workflow to label stale issues and PRs #101

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@mhucka mhucka commented Aug 12, 2025

As more and more issues and pull requests start to accumulate, it can be helpful to automatically label stale issues and PRs and automatically close them after a time.

This workflow labels issues with stale if the have not had any activity for 90 days or more, and auto-closes them if they have not had any further activity 60 days after that.

As more and more issues and pull requests start to accumulate, it can be
helpful to automatically label stale issues and PRs and automatically
close them after a time.

This workflow labels issues with `stale` if the have not had any
activity for 90 days or more, and auto-closes them if they have not had
any further activity 60 days after that.
@mhucka mhucka marked this pull request as ready for review August 12, 2025 22:12
@mhucka mhucka requested review from noajshu, LalehB and viathor August 12, 2025 22:13
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Thank you so much, Mike, for adding this. However, I have a concern about this approach:

  • What if there is a long-standing issue that needs time to address? It seems to me such issues could be handled manually.

  • That said, I think this is a nice idea for stale PRs.

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mhucka commented Aug 13, 2025

  • What if there is a long-standing issue that needs time to address? It seems to me such issues could be handled manually.

It's true, sometimes issues do take long. There are several options:

  1. If anything changes (a comment, a label added, etc), then the clock is reset. Often for long-standing issues, something changes, so this often takes care of the problem naturally.
  2. When an issue is auto-labeled with stale, someone can manually remove the label, and that will reset the clock for another 90 days.
  3. There's a list of labels that makes issues & PRs exempt. Currently the labels are help wanted and health. We could add others; also, we could add a label specifically to mean "don't ever mark this stale".

It sounds like a new label might be worth adding. What should it be called? Random ideas off the top of my head: never stale, evergreen, undead (just kidding about that last one), or something else?

The official YAML file extension is actually `.yaml`. I've been trying
to standardize on using that, but sometimes I miss it.
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