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Tracer Gardening

Mikayla Toffler edited this page Apr 20, 2026 · 7 revisions

Gardening

What is gardening?

"Gardening" in open source projects refers to the background maintenance tasks done to keep the project healthy & growing & nice looking.

This details how the dd-trace-go team performs "gardening" on the dd-trace-go repository.

Gardening Tasks

Before doing any gardening work, especially on the issue tracker, remember to familiarize yourself with the issues life-cycle, described here: Handling Issues - Issue States.

Triage new issues

Look at the untriaged issues.

While triaging the issue:

  • is it a duplicate? Close it with a comment explaining the close, moving to done state.
  • is the subject the correct format?
    • If it is a bug, the title should start with the package path and a colon: "net/http: fix crash in Server during foo operation".
    • If it is a proposal, the title should be "proposal: [brief description of the proposed feature]".
  • What team does this work belong to?
    • apply one of the team labels.

When the issue has been triaged, if the work is for the tracer team, add an appropriate label per https://github.com/DataDog/dd-trace-go/wiki/Handling-Issues-(Go-Tracer)#issue-states to mark it as such.

Waiting For Info

Link

Find issues that are in state waiting-for-info and ping them, remove the label if there have been replies, or close issues that have not received a reply in 3 months or more. You do not have to respond to the new info. We can do that later. Merely removing the waiting-for-info label is enough.

Questions

Link

Find issues that are questions without the waiting-for-info label and answer them, shifting them to either waiting-for-info or done as appropriate.

Needs Investigation

Link

Find issues that are in the needs-investigation state (without the waiting-for-info label) and decide if it is valid, and what kind of issue (bug, proposal, question) it is. Issues should be moved out of this state according to the guidelines here

Finished Issues

Link

Any issues in the proposal/rejected, done, or fixed states which are not closed should be closed with a comment such as one of the templates in the Handling Issues doc.

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