npm, the npm github issue tracker, and you!

The npm cli GitHub project is one of the most active on all of GitHub. The npm cli team is made up of two people, Rebecca Turner and Kat Marchán. At the time of this writing there are 3,244 open issues in the issue tracker. That’s clearly more issue than a team of two can reasonably handle, even with the invaluable help of the community. It’s even more untenable when you consider that this team is the team fixing the vast majority of the bugs and implementing new features.

Prior to January of 2017 some effort was made to try work the issue tracker while still working on the cli. That was put aside so that we could focus on npm@5. Ongoing we can not and do not want to continue ignoring the issue tracker. Even with its overwhelming size it’s extremely helpful.

So in an attempt to make it serve our team better we’re going to begin automatically closing issues that go too long without activity. This reflects the existing reality that older issues are unlikely to get attention. By making this explicit we hope that it will help ensure that issues that are pain points do not disappear into the churn: If our bots close your issue and it’s still a problem for you, please open a new version of it.

The initial policies are outlined below. We’ll revisit these over time and may adjust some of the numbers. To begin with, we are only considering closing issues that are neither assigned to a team member nor assigned to a milestone. If we do either of those the issue or pull request will stay open.

For issues triaged as support: Issues with no activity for three days will be closed. While we want to give community members an opportuntity to help each other, ultimately this is not the venue for that. You’ll likely be better served by joining something like package.community and asking your questions there.

For issues that have not received any triage (no labels): Issues with no activity for seven days will be closed. Ideally all incoming issues would be triaged but in practice this isn’t practical. Most of these issues are support issues.

For issues that have all other issues: Issues with no activity for thirty days will be closed. If your issue is closed and it’s still a problem for you then we encourage you to open a new issue.

For pull requests: Pull requests with no activity for sixty days will be closed. You are always welcome to open a new pull request (but please rebase on to npm/npm#latest).