In the past we’ve discussed about closing stale PRs (prs with no activity, no comment or anything after a certain period), however we have never reached a decision on how many days of no activity that the PR can be considered stale.
There is now a GitHub Action for automatically markings PRs and issues as stale, and it can also automatically close the stale issue/PR.
It works as follows: if a the PR has no activity after certain (configurable) period, it will apply the “stale” label, and leave a comment to give a warning that this PR is now stale. If someone them leaves a comment in the PR (they can leave a comment saying “I’m waiting for review” or “still working on it” or anything) , then the stale label gets removed.
However if there continued to be no activity, no further comments after certain number of days, then the bot will close the PR.
Questions and decisions needed:
- Should we enable this stale GitHub actions for the CPython repo? (wip PR for adding it: https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/21247)
- if we enable it, how many days of no activity do we consider the PR as stale?
- how many days should it wait before closing the PR? (this is required configuration by the GitHub action)