Maintainers guide

Triage rules

Guidance for triage of issues for team members working in this codebase:

1. Please acquaint yourself with the "Issue Triaging" guide.

2. Triage any issues within your "area" with "untriaged" label

   • If you expect the issue to be worked by the team
     • Assign an appropriate "area" label
     • Assign an engineer who will be working on the issue
     • If you don't expect to be working on the issue in foreseeable future - assign the issue to "Backlog" milestone.
   • If you don't expect the team work on the issue
     • Assign "help wanted" label and unassign assignees, if any - or -
     • Consider closing the issue - just explain why and be polite.

Motivation for triage rules

1. Issue has no Assignee, unless someone is working on the issue at the moment.

   • Motivation: Observation is that contributors are less likely to grab assigned issues, no matter what the repository rules say.

2. Use "help wanted" as much as possible, ideally with a quick note about next steps / complexity of the issue.
   NB: Per https://up-for-grabs.net/, such issues should be no longer than few nights' worth of work. They should be actionable (that is, no mysterious CI failures that can't be tested in the open).

3. Set milestone to "Backlog", unless you can 95%-commit you can fund the issue in specific milestone.

   • Motivation: Helps communicate desire/timeline to community. Can spark further priority/impact discussion.

4. Each issue has exactly one "area" label.