Framework: GitHub Workflows to close dead issues?

[william76]

Enhancement

@trilinos/framework

I'm creating this issue to facilitate and track a discussion on setting up a GitHub workflow to automate closing abandoned issues.

There are quite a few issues in Trilinos that are really old and can be deleted because they're either:
a. Resolved but not closed
b. Outdated / Not applicable anymore
c. Deferred indefinitely / Will not be implemented

GitHub provides workflow infrastructure that could let us mark old issues that have zero activity after XXX days as stale and then close them after another NNN days after being marked stale. It uses some flags to do it so you can set up flags to exempt issues from the cleanup, etc. but I think if we set the timelines long enough that we don't need the flags. Details on what is available to the YAML files can be found here.

Something like:

• Mark an issue stale after 1 year of inactivity
• Close it 1 month later if the issue still isn't touched.

I think it's a reasonable ask that if someone wants an issue to persist for long term that they should touch it at least once every 13 months or it'll get closed out. Issues that have periodic activity would never trigger the cleanup since the timer is based on time-since-last-activity.

Since there are still 'open' issues from as far back as 2015 that haven't been touched in years, I expect many of them will never be addressed.

We can specify a label that would exempt an issue from this cleanup, but I'm not sure if we should add that or just ask that people would touch their issue tickets at least once a year.

[william76]

Closing this because #8306 covers the issue.