If someone opens an issue on GitHub but more information to reproduce the error is asked and never given, what's the normal procedure? Example.
Here the author states that the "nav breaks". While I believe it is fixed, I would like word from the author to make sure we were talking about the same thing. But sometimes the issue's reporter just disappears. Is it a good/common practice to set a expiration date for abandoned issues?
Something like these conditions:
- A question is raised on the issue to be able to debug it.
- Over 2-6 months have passed since the last unanswered question/comment from the dev team.
- Bug cannot be reproduced at the time of closing it (for any reason, maybe they could never be reproduced).
- A warning is issued 2 weeks before closing it.
What do projects normally do? I couldn't find anything on Google. Also, how would I document this? Does a simple note in the README.md detailing the points above and a comment in the issue explaining why it's being closed suffice?
Note: it's different from this question since the bug might still be relevant (or not), however there's lack of information.
Best Answer
This is a dilemma: you cannot close the issue as "fixed", because you don't actually know if it was fixed, or at least even if some issue was fixed, you don't actually know whether this was the issue the reporter was talking about. On the other hand, you don't want to leave an issue that might have been fixed open, especially if you won't ever be able to close it because you'll never get confirmation.
So, you should close it, but probably not as "fixed". You could invent a custom close reason "maybefixed" or "unconfirmedfix" if you want to be positive or "reportervanished" if you don't. You could also just say "could not reproduce", and wait for the same bug to pop up for a more responsive reporter.
However, you should not expend resources on a bug for which you will never know whether it was actually fixed or not.