Pilotting the new GitHub labels

[fmichonneau]

@alee @ntmoore @souravsingh

I added to the repository the proposed set of GitHub labels that we're planning to use across all repositories for the Carpentries. We are in a piloting phase and we want to start using them to see if adjustments are needed before we deploy them everywhere. We are going to test them first in a few repositories including this one until the end of the month. The goal is make it easier for people to contribute to the lessons by identifying more clearly which issues can be worked on, and the type of work that needs to be done, and to make it easier for you as a maintainer to sort through the issues and pull requests you receive.

It would be great if you could split among yourselves the issues that are currently in the repository and assign at least 2 labels for each: one in the "status" category, and in the "type" category. Depending on the context, you may also want to add the "bug-bbq", the "good first issue" or the "high-priority" labels.

Ideally, we'd like to remove the legacy labels by the end of the month as well, so issues with these old labels should be re-assigned new labels.

I'd like your feedback on how well these labels capture the type of issues that are currently in the repository, or that you have received in the past. If you feel that some labels don't capture the nature of the issue, or if the meaning of the labels is too unclear to make a call, I'd really like to hear about it.

The definition of the labels is available in this proposal: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b3nIZ6N4IHY24JmLNQ5rkwUACEVS9Hls3auzZD7zHqk/edit

Feel free to ping me on Slack, by email or here if you have any questions or with your comments/feedback.

Thank you for your help with this!

[fmichonneau]

Hello Maintainers,

Have you had a chance to look into the proposed GitHub labels? How are they working for your repository? What are your suggestions to make them better?

Thanks!

[souravsingh]

@fmichonneau I took a look at the proposed Github labels. They are working well for our repository and I personally like them a lot.

[alee]

@fmichonneau

Overall I think it's a good idea to develop a consistent set of labels to make it easier to find / track issues, but I agree with @katrinleinweber that we should be searching for a minimal set; it is laborious doing label management if too fine grained

Where possible we should merge labels or remove them entirely if unnecessary.

• I'm not a fan of the type: status: prefixes - IMO they just add line noise. The name of the issue should be enough to convey if it's a status or a type.
• several of the implicit statuses like status: pr-in-review and status: completed. PRs should instead refer to the issue via their number, e.g., #168
• consistent conventions in naming / titles can help discovery as well as Katrin mentioned
• I don't think the typo, formatting, and clarification labels are necessary (clarification is covered by enhancement, typos and formatting are so trivial that we don't need to label them and are often covered in the issue title

[katrinleinweber]

Thanks for summarizing the pain points, @alee. I propose a smaller label set here: https://github.com/carpentries/handbook/pull/134 (WIP, comments welcome).