On one hand, we encourage users to participate in eclipse and a first step is to file bugs.
But at least I as a bug-author absolutely HATE it if bugs that I invested time to write are auto-closed.
This is everything but encouraging.
I’ve also seen others on twitter complain about it.
(if anybody cares, I think this practice should also be ended on Platform)
Notifications on stale bugs don’t matter, because they can be deleted without worrying if the bugs don’t get closed.
I agree with that.
As a committer, I don't think auto-closing helps at making me more productive, and I know it can be irritating and even disrespectful for the bug author. So IMO, it has no clear value (at least to me) but it has a negative impact on the community. For those reasons, I think that auto-close, or even auto-marking bugs as "stale" could totally be terminated.
I don't get the idea of marking a bug as stale in the title or comments. What would that change anyway? Would the bug receive more or less attention? If the former (get attention), isn't a plain comment enough?
I have the impression that the only benefit is to show positive trends of "we closed many bugs". I think such metrics are not to be trusted anyway if some bugs are closed while not being verified as fixed. Stopping the auto-close would for sure show some smaller numbers, but at least they'd be *real* numbers which can be used for proper estimations.
