Introduce automated mechanism closing stuck pull requests

[dstenger]

E.g. a bot can do the job.

[copierrj]

Apparently this can be done using an action: https://github.com/actions/stale

[stephanr]

As discussed in the code sprint, we decided to update the stuck/delete workflow for PRs and shorten the timeframe.
The current timeframe should be reduced from 12 months to 90 days and from “stuck” to “closed” after another 90 days.

I propose these texts to be used for the automation:

Comment for PRs when marked “stuck”:

Thank you for your contribution. Unfortunately, this PR has been inactive for 90 days (see PR stuck workflow). Of course this is not the final word. The PR can become unstuck, for example, by reengaging in the discussion, answering open questions, rebasing, or adding new commits to this PR.

Comment for “stuck” PRs that will be closed:

Thank you for your contribution. Unfortunately, this PR got stuck (see PR stuck workflow). Of course this is not the final word. If you think that we did wrong, then reopening this pull request, continuing the conversation, and/or finishing any outstanding tasks will help to restart the decision-making process. Perhaps we can then, with additional information, merge the pull request. Anyhow, we do appreciate your commitment to open source and to deegree in particular.

Change the section Pull requests marked for deletion of our "Working with pull request" wiki page to:

Pull requests stuck workflow

On the rare occasion the TMC decides on not merging a PR into the deegree code base, and a pull request may be closed without being merged. The TMC tries to support every committer to pass the checklist as described above. In case the PR remains open and inactive for approx. 90 days, this PR will be marked as "stuck".
If no improvement has taken place to overcome the stuck state after an additional time frame of approx. 90 days, the TMC will (automatically) close the PR.

Please keep in mind: No work will get lost. The code changes are still available, and a closed pull request can be reopened.

Lifecycle of a Pull request

• Open: Waiting for approval by the TMC
• "stuck": The PR went inactive as there are open tasks like missing feedback or the PR was abdonned
• Closed: After beeing automaticlly close a label "auto-closed" will be added.

[tfr42]

On the rare occasion the TMC decides on not merging a PR into the deegree code base, and a pull request may be closed without being merged. The TMC tries to support every committer to pass the checklist as described above. In case a PR remains open and inactive for approx. 90 days, this PR will be marked as "stuck".
If no improvement has taken place to overcome the stuck state after an additional time frame of approx. 90 days, the TMC will automatically close the PR.

Lifecycle of a Pull request

• Open: Waiting for approval by the TMC.
• Stuck: The PR went inactive as there are open tasks like missing feedback or the PR was abandoned.
• Closed: After being automatically closed a label "auto-closed" will be added to the PR.

Please keep in mind: No work will get lost. The code changes are still available, and a closed pull request can be reopened.

[stephanr]

As preparation before the stale-bot GitHub Actions will change from dry-run to performing changes, the log was reviewed to see if the configuration is correct.

Reviewed run: https://github.com/deegree/deegree3/actions/runs/18703994562/job/53338279425

Observations made:

• The overall run is limited to 30 tokens, which resulted into only the first 10 pr's to be processed
• The order from new to old
• The bot would have done the following:
  • closed:
    • CSW client: capability to send along custom http headers #823
  • unstuck:
    • Add missing synchronized #1099 (Pull request has been updated since it was marked stale: true)
    • Reenable disabled unit test and fix bugs #1608 (Pull request has been updated since it was marked stale: true)
  • stuck:
    • Fixed count limit for response paging in two situations #1118
    • Refactored import statements to use org.junit.Assert  #1167
    • Fix SVG rendering issues #1207
    • Add support for GeoPackage to deegree #1437
    • Fixed tests by replacing utah-workspace demo by deegree-webservices demo #1808
  • no-operation needed
    • Upgraded Primefaces to non-LTS version 15 #1899
    • Improved code quality by removing unnecessary boxing of wrapper types #1900

The only part that was not expected was that an already stuck PR will go unstuck because of later changes in label/milestone.

[stephanr]

After running, the action behaved as expected. So in 90/180 days we will see if PRs got closed as expected.
The wikki was updated with c2a486f