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Feature request: Option to move a PR from "open" to "draft" #1130
Description
Description:
Currently the stale action allows a 2-level workflow:
- after X days: mark as stale (+add comment, add label)
- after Y days: close the PR
It could be interesting to allow a 3-level workflow:
- after X days: move PR from "open" to "draft" (+optionally add comment)
- after Y days: mark as stale (+add comment, add label)
- after Z days: close the PR
Alternatively, if this sounds too complicated, an easier first step would be to "move to draft" as an subaction of marking as stale:
- after X days: mark as stale (optionally add comment, optionally add label, +optionally move to draft)
- after Y days: close the PR
Justification:
Personally I find marking PRs as "stale" and closing them as "this should only happen on very old PRs" (many months old). Whereas moving back to draft is "less dramatic".
- Draft PRs are a standard GH feature and have semantically different meaning and behavior.
- For example, PR marked as draft can't be merged by accident.
- Marking PR as draft is leagues better than adding a label:
- drafts are visually distinct from other PRs:
- in PR detail view
/pull/<n>(status icon in top-left of the PR) - in PR list
/pulls, drafts have a different icon as well
- in PR detail view
- drafts are searchable and can be excluded via a standard
-is:draftquery in GitHub searchbox, the query will be the same across all repositories.- For example one can find all review requests assigned to them on non-draft PRs via this query
is:pr is:open user-review-requested:@me -is:draft - (To be fair, one could argue that the same can be achieved by
-label:stale, although the label can be different in each repo, depending on the config).
- For example one can find all review requests assigned to them on non-draft PRs via this query
- drafts are visually distinct from other PRs:
- There are certain third-party integrations for the PRs which have an option to exclude draft PRs. For example GitHub-Slack integration which reminds about pending PR reviews.
Are you willing to submit a PR?
No
Reacted by Brian, Vít Kučera, Sergio Garcia and Anton Agestam
Reacted by Brian
Activity
v-HarithaVattikuti commentedon Jan 26, 2024
Hello @jakub-g
Thank you for creating this feature request. We will investigate it and get back to you as soon as we have some feedback.
mofosyne commentedon Jun 9, 2024
In addition it be good to combine this with some form of merge conflict detection to auto set to draft if older than X days with no activity and merge conflict has emerged or CI build is failing.
This is because just because a PR is old doesn't mean its outdated, but a merge conflict or failing CI is a pretty good indicator that more work is needed.
FYI you can lift code from here to get merge conflict detection https://github.com/eps1lon/actions-label-merge-conflict/blob/main/sources/main.ts
This is of interest so I can integrate these automation in a few community projects like llama.cpp
vkucera commentedon May 16, 2025
@HarithaVattikuti Has there been any progress in implementing this feature?
The 3-level workflow option would really be useful for many reasons. It is quite common to run heavy tests, like compilation, only on PRs marked as ready for review. The option to automatically convert inactive PRs to drafts would allow to avoid wasting resources on PRs which have pending changes.