Issue and Pull Request Lifecycle Manager

Istio uses an automated system to manage the lifecycle of issues and pull requests. The process is designed to help us keep on top of the set of incoming issues and pull requests.

The lifecycle manager looks at the current state of each open issue and pull requests and does one of two things:

• Edits some lifecycle/* label on the issue or pull request

• Closes the issue or pull request

Here are the labels that the lifecycle manager can set:

• lifecycle/needs-triage. An issue or PR that hasn’t been assigned a priority in ZenHub by an Istio team member yet.

• lifecycle/needs-escalation. A P0 or Release Blocker issue that hasn’t received any attention from an Istio team member in a few days.

• lifecycle/stale. An issue or PR that hasn’t been worked on by an Istio team member in weeks.

• lifecycle/automatically-closed. An annotation to indicate an issue or PR was closed by the lifecycle manager due to being stale for a long time.

You can apply the lifecycle/staleproof label to tell the lifecycle manager to leave a particular issue or pull request alone and not edit any labels or close the item.

Please see this design document for information about the lifecycle manager.