"NextMinor" GitHub issue label

[Austin Clements]

Hi everyone. We’re trying out a minor change to our GitHub issue process. I’ve added a “NextMinor” label for marking critical issues that affect the security, availability, or correctness of production systems built using the Go distribution and tools, or of the tools themselves. Basically, these are issues we should always aim to fix by the next minor release.

This is intended as an experiment for tracking our own service level. We’ll try it out for a few months and see if there’s enough signal for this to be useful.

So if you’re gardening the issue tracker and notice an issue that meets the “criticality” definition I gave above, please feel free to add NextMinor.

This clearly has overlap with opening backport/cherry-pick issues. This label should be applied as soon as we know an issue needs to be fixed in the next minor release, whereas backport issues are often created later in the process, often only once there’s a fix, and occasionally critical fixes don’t require a backport issue (though this is rare). It’s completely fine if the outcome of this experiment is that we learn we just need to tweak the backports process.

Thanks everyone!