Cleaning up our GitHub issue labels

In many FOSS projects, the labels that one can use to categorize issues are grouped by type. And each issue generally has at most one label of a given type.

Sometimes this categorization of labels is supported by features of the bug tracker itself. For instance, GitLab offers this. This is used for instance by the Inkscape project:

For instance, they use this for their importance ranking (“Importance: Low”), to categorize which tool of Inkscape is affected by an issue (“Tool: Shape Builder”) or which operating system is affected (“OS: Windows”).

Gitea also offers this, and is used for instance by Blender: Labels - blender - Blender Projects

As far as I can tell, there is no built-in support for this in GitHub, but some projects hosted there still adopt this structure. For instance Docusaurus: Labels · facebook/docusaurus · GitHub

I would be interested in introducing a similar structure in our labels. The goal would be to make our labeling system more principled, so that new contributors could start labeling things on their own more easily. We could also use this opportunity to give the same color to all labels of the same type, so that we can more easily identify issues where no label of a given type (or multiple ones) have been assigned. The task would first consist in trying to group the existing tags we have into categories. Then, cleaning up tags that are not used much and introducing missing tags identified by the classification effort could be useful.

Do you think this would be a sensible move? Do you wish for any other improvements to our labels?

I worry that it narrows our filtering ability not broadens. But ya know what? Let’s give it a try!