Not sure if a forum post on this is overkill or not but I’ve noticed we have a bunch of stale backport labels in the docs repo.
I’d imagine it’s fine to just delete labels for old versions like, say, stable-2.14. That’ll also remove the label from any associated PRs but new labels can be re-applied before merge anyway. It might also be a good time to see if we can close some older PRs or revive them.
@gotmax23 or @felixfontein Could there be any unintended consequences with patchback? I’d guess not, but would like to ask. Thanks.
I guess it’s nice to clean things up, but I’m also fine with keeping the labels for historical reasons. If we do end up deciding to remove them, I don’t see any technical reasons why we couldn’t — AFAIK Patchback only responds when a pull request is merged or a new label is added to an already merged pull request to create backports.
In my collection repos I always delete all backport-x labels that correspond to branches that are EOL. This makes it easier to use the labels (the list is shorter, and you can’t accidentally add a label for an EOL branch). I haven’t seen any downsides so far.
Thanks for the replies. Since there’s no technical reason to keep the labels I’ll remove them for housekeeping purposes. The other day I was looking through the labels and noticed we have a growing list of unused labels. To tie into what @felixfontein said about accidentally applying a stale label for an EOL branch, maybe pruning would be less confusing for infrequent contributors who don’t know which branches are supported. Cheers!