docker / docker/docs

CI: prevent stale-bot from closing "help-wanted" tickets (or tickets attached to projects)

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agent/skip agent/triaged github_actions kind/enhancement lifecycle/frozen
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Description

Is this a docs issue?
  • My issue is about the documentation content or website
Type of issue

Other

Description

The stale-bot automatically closes tickets after there's been no activity for some time. Some of these tickets were "acknowledged" (valid), but not yet being worked on.

While it's good to periodically clean up stale issues, we should also prevent tickets from being closed prematurely; (IMO) it's ok to have a backlog of tickets to work on; not all may have "top" priority, but having tickets to track things to improve is useful.

Location
Suggestion

We should prevent tickets from being closed automatically if;

  • a "help-wanted" label is set; these are tickets that may be "lower" priority, but could be "good first issues" for contributors
  • a project is set (these may not be publicly visible, but we have some internal GitHub projects keeping backlogs for teams, such as "runtime-team" and "build-team"

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Locate the stale-bot configuration used by this repository and inspect how it decides which issues to close. Update the behavior so issues with a help-wanted label or an attached project are excluded, then verify both exemption cases in the CI configuration or its available checks.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
github-actions
Domain
ci-cd
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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