When and how to close Github issues?

OK, but I don’t think your proposal would help. That is, it’d do more harm than good.

As far as I understand, this is what we (all?) agree about: there’s a spectrum here, ranging from never asking for feedback on whether the issue is solved, to always doing that, and blocking closing the issue on the feedback. While you advocate for asking for feedback by default, IMO that’s not at all appropriate for volunteer open source projects.

Why your proposal wouldn’t do much good: user feedback is much less valuable than CI. Many would say that whatever’s not covered by CI isn’t supported anyway. If it’s not covered by CI it’ll bit rot again anyway sooner or later.

Why your proposal would be harmful:

  • Both the maintainers and issue submitters here are volunteers, may lack free time, and may be located all over the globe. Synchronizing with each other may be (unpredictably) time consuming.
  • It’d take away precious developer time, that could instead be used for fixing other issues.

In conclusion, I’d say it’s not the case that the community doesn’t want to improve, it’s rather that there are simply disagreements of opinion on the best practices here.

The workflow you propose may work better for some corpos, but that’s probably because they have dedicated QA people.

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