Don't retire users who the commit-bit-delegation team have decided not to retire this time.

[MattSturgeon]

Currently the retire script will open a draft PR for anyone who has held a commit bit longer than a year and not used it for at least a year.

The wording of the created PR allows the delegation to use their own judgement to decide whether or not to retire the individual, however if they were to close the PR, another one would be opened the next time the bot runs.

I'd propose implementing a way to postpone retirement checks in such exceptional circumstances.

One way we could do this would be to extend the content of the "member" file to include multiple fields; "created at" and "eligible for retirement at". To preserve existing behaviour: if the file is empty or a field is missing, then "created at" defaults to the file's merge date and "eligible for retirement at" defaults to one year after "created at".

This avoids asking people to arbitrarily merging something just to satisfy the bot, which could inadvertently encourage poor-quality merges.

Instead, the delegation can elect to grant specific users a "stay of execution" by explicitly postponing their "eligible for retirement at" date.

[infinisil]

Alternatively, what if those PRs were just kept open, but as a draft?

[MattSturgeon]

Alternatively, what if those PRs were just kept open, but as a draft?

For me, the PRs being left open feels like the question of retirement is left "unresolved", even if the commit-bit-delegation has decided what to do.

It'd also be easy to forget about such PRs. One advantage of explicitly postponing their retirement eligibility is that a new PR will open if they are still inactive after that date.

[wolfgangwalther]

Yeah keeping them open is confusing. It's feels like the same thing that happens in Nixpkgs all the time: A PR is stalled, but no decision is made. Decisions to extend the bit better be explicit, with a "specifically granted extension", I think.

[infinisil]

I guess I mainly care about keeping the implementation as simple as possible. Considering that, we can just use the date of when the last PR was closed to override the receptionEpoch:

gh api /repos/NixOS/nixpkgs-committers/pulls \
  --method GET \
  -f state=closed \
  -f head=NixOS:retire-m1cr0man \
  --jq '.[0].closed_at | fromdateiso8601'
1756506798

[wolfgangwalther]

So essentially, by closing the PR, the system is told "please ask again in one year", right?

[infinisil]

Yup

[infinisil]

Now implemented: #45