What do the labels for GitHub issues mean?

đź’» Development
1

I was going through the issues for Nextcloud Deck, and I noticed a few labels on issues that aren’t very clear about their purpose. For instance there is a “discussion” label, but also “needs discussion”.

It is unclear whether “needs discussion” implies something like “please discuss if feature is necessary”. Or is it a call to discuss the technical options for implementing the feature? This has to be frustrating for both users and new contributors since they will have no clue what the current state of the issue is.

Is there a page explaining the labels used in Nextcloud’s repos? I couldn’t find anything on the Deck repo, nor could I find a meta repository in the Nextcloud org that would contain such info. There are a lot of repos though.

2

I found this:

But other than that, we could try to guess, in doubt ask for clarification in the related repository.

3

It varies across the project in my experience.

Is this ideal? Debatable.

Some repo’s (and their labels) could almost certainly benefit from some tidying. Or, at the very least, the addition of extended descriptions.

The server (core) repo has documented primary labels in the Nextcloud Developer Manual: Coding style & general guidelines — Nextcloud 35 Developer Manual

Those are generally followed there.

Many repos in the project follow a similar convention or some hybrid.

However each repo is semi-independent. So different maintainers have different conventions. Also some are historical for various reasons (e.g. depending on where the sub-project started).

This has to be frustrating for both users and new contributors since they will have no clue what the current state of the issue is.

Agreed. Keeping things organized takes work. I did a bunch of label related tidying awhile back; lately my focus has been elsewhere. There’s certainly more work to be done in this area.