Triage is basically filtering the issues/discussions, and categorizing them with the proper labels.
If you've been given triage rights, you are allowed to do the following things:
- Apply labels to issues
- Close, reopen, and assign all issues and pull requests
- Mark duplicate issues and pull requests
- Request pull request reviews
- Lock and unlock discussions
- Individually convert issues to discussions
Note: We don't use milestones or project boards.
The following are guidelines as we cannot cover all situations. Use common sense, and just do your best, and you'll do all right. Don't be afraid to ask for help.
All issues should have labels attached to them. Read the issue-labeling guide to get all the necessary info.
In general try to make a good-faith effort to label things correctly.
You can close a issue yourself if it's:
- Spam
- Obviously fixed
For really old issues, it's probably a good idea to ask the maintainers to decide if they want to keep or close the issue.
It's not very often that you'll need to close a PR, but you can certainly do it in case of spam or malicious content in the PR diff.
Sometimes a bug is fixed with a PR that links to a issue. When the PR is merged, the issue is automatically closed. Sometimes the bug was not really fixed, and someone says: "Hey this is still broken for me." In that case, re-open the issue only if it's definitely the same problem (users often associate different problems together incorrectly). Otherwise, ask the user to open a new issue if it seems like it is different.
You can assign a issue to yourself, so that others know you're going to work on the issue. GitHub allows issues to be assigned to any project collaborator or to any non-collaborator who has created or commented on the issue, so you can also assign in either of those cases if it makes sense.
If you see an issue that's an obvious duplicate:
- Attach a
duplicatelabel - Use the "Duplicate of" functionality GitHub docs, about duplicate issues and pull requests
- Close the issue
Follow the same workflow to mark duplicate PRs.
You can request a review from one of the maintainers, in case this is needed to get the PR review process rolling.
Sometimes a discussion can go sour, like when people call each other names, or post spam, or veer off-topic. In those cases you can lock the discussion to prevent further escalation.
Sometimes a issue that's raised at the Renovate repository is not really a bug or a feature request. This happens most often because a user files a bug for things that are really a misstake in the Renovate configuration. Those "configuration help" issues are then moved to the discussions board for further help.
One of the most important non-code contributions people can do is help features and fixes go from status:requirements to status:ready.
We use the label status:requirements to mean "more information or research is needed before someone could start coding this".
It can sometimes be an oversight of the maintainers, but more often it's because there are requirements or edge cases to consider and the user hasn't got an opinion or time to think about them and contribute enough. Sometimes it can be because there's a need for some research and "design" decisions to be made, which may require maintainers to do, but it's not high enough priority to justify the time yet.
In a way status:requirements means "someone's going to need to put more thought into this before it can move forward to development".
It can also mean "don't start this now because you might do something which can't be accepted into the code base".