Better status labels for issues

[dotproto]

In our last meeting we briefly discussed creating labels that would make it easier to understand the status of an issue at a galance. During this conversation I indicated that I had an idea and would follow up by creating an issue.

This issue describes the initial set of labels that I'm suggesting.(hopefully) will be used to discuss and iterate on status labels moving forward.

Background Research

To help generate an initial set of suggestions, I consulted the Chrome and Firefox issue trackers to see what they used.

Monorail (Chromium)

The following issues status were extracted from the Status select dropdown on crbug's new issue page.

• Open
  • Unconfirmed = New, has not been verified or reproduced
  • Untriaged = Confirmed, not reviewed for priority and assignment
  • Available = Triaged, but no owner assigned
  • Assigned = In someone's queue, but not started
  • Started = Work in progress
  • ExternalDependency = Requires action from a third party
• Closed
  • Fixed = Work completed on main, needs verification and merges (if applicable)
  • Duplicate = Same root cause as another issue
  • Verified = Test or reporter verified that the fix worked on all applicable branches
  • WontFix = Cannot reproduce, works as intended, invalid, or obsolete
  • Archived = Old issue with no activity

Bugzilla (Firefox)

The following statuses were taken from the BMO User Guide.

• Open bugs
  • Status
    • UNCONFIRMED
    • NEW
    • ASSIGNED
    • REOPENED
• Closed bugs
  • Status
    • RESOLVED
    • VERIFIED
  • Resolution
    • FIXED
    • INVALID
    • WONTFIX
    • MOVED
    • DUPLICATE
    • WORKSFORME
    • INCOMPLETE

Note that the following options are listed in the advanced search page, but were not listed in the BMO User Guide.

• Status
  • CLOSED
• Resolution
  • INACTIVE
  • SUPPORT
  • EXPIRED

Initial status labels

The proposed labels use a "Status: " prefix scheme to help differentiate status labels from other types of labels.

Open statuses

• Status: Open
• Status: Assigned
• Status: Blocked
• Status: Need more info

Closed statuses

• Status: Resolved
• Status: Archived
• Status: Duplicate
• Status: Won't fix
• Status: Out of scope

[carlosjeurissen]

Previously proposed in #244.

As we are dealing a w3c community group. It seems alternative labels are needed as we are dealing with consensus versus implementation. That's why in #233, I proposed labels like:
status: consensus-reached and status: widely-implemented seems to make more sense.

We can draw inspiration from the CSS w3c group (https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/labels), which has the following:
Closed Accepted as Editorial
Closed Accepted as Obvious Bugfix
Closed Accepted by CSSWG Resolution
Closed Accepted by Editor Discretion
Closed as Duplicate
Closed as Question Answered
Closed as Retracted
Closed Deferred
Closed Rejected as Invalid
Closed Rejected as OutOfScope
Closed Rejected as Wontfix by CSSWG Resolution
Closed Rejected as Wontfix by Editor Discretion

Moving this to our group, something like the following makes sense:
Duplicate
Rejected
Accepted
Implemented
Need more info
Question Answered
Deferred
Ready for discussion (meeting)

This could be prefixed with status: or with the Closed as like the csswg-drafts group.

In the case of our situation, we have vendor-specific accepted and implemented statuses. As some vendors could achieve consensus while others might disagree. If they are browser-specific, we can add the following:
Accepted (Chrome)
Rejected (Edge)
Rejected (Firefox)
Accepted (Safari)
Rejected (Firefox)
Accepted (Safari)
Implemented (Firefox)
Implemented (Safari)

[xeenon]

I went ahead an made some of the proposed labels to try out. Thoughts?

status: duplicate
status: invalid
status: resolved

accepted: chrome
accepted: edge
accepted: firefox
accepted: safari

implemented: chrome
implemented: edge
implemented: firefox
implemented: safari

rejected: chrome
rejected: edge
rejected: firefox
rejected: safari

[xeenon]

I also added a proposal label.

[Rob--W]

During today's meeting we agreed to proceed with the labels above, but with Accepted renamed to Supportive.

I also note that there is a chrome: follow-up bug, but none for other vendors. Let's introduce them? Either firefox: follow-up, safari: follow-up and edge: follow-up, or for consistency with the above labels, the other way around.

@xeenon @dotproto @mukul-p WDYT?

[carlosjeurissen]

chrome: follow-up was originally added by @dotproto for personal use. If other browsers also want to have such label or if it makes sense to let externals flag issues with these flags (which might contradict @dotproto's usecase), I would be in favour of aligning it with the other syntax so to have followup: chrome.

Yet any issue which doesn't have a browser: accepted, browser: implemented, browser: rejected could be seen as something to follow up on.

@xeenon did we agree on adding neutral labels, something like no-objections: browser?

[xeenon]

I renamed accepted to supportive and rejected to opposed to better match our working used in meetings.

I also added follow-up for the other browsers and renamed the Chrome one to match.

I finally added neutral for all the browsers.

[hanguokai]

I suggest adding a new label called breaking-change. Any proposal or deprecation that will cause breaking changes should be added this label.

[carlosjeurissen]

@hanguokai I would also be in favour of adding breaking-change. Now we are again talking about status labels, it seems the topics label can use some cleanup as well. As a starter, I would like to nominate the following:

topic: action

anything related to the browser.action, browser.pageAction and browser.browserAction APIs
anything related to the browser_action, page_action and action manifest keys

topic: localisation

anything related to the browser.i18n APIs
anything related to languages, translations, and localisation

[carlosjeurissen]

It would also be good to revisit label colors. For example, the yellow of agenda conflicts with the yellow of chrome.

[xeenon]

I went ahead and changed the agenda label color.

[dotproto]

I just created the following labels:

• breaking change (requested here)
• topic: localization (requested here)
• topic: action (requested here)