Write or identify tooling for maintaining consistent labels across multiple repositories

[larsks]

We want to use labels for project planning, but labels are local per repository. We need a tool for ensuring that all of our repositories share at least a base set of labels. There are three major subtasks to complete for this issue:

• What's our label vocabulary? Before we can talk about propagating a common set of labels to our repositories, we need to figure out which labels form our common taxonomy (Propose a common taxonomy for issue and pr labels ops-docs#15).
• What repositories do we manage? We could just pick "everything in the cci-moc organization", but that might not be appropriate. There are 150 or so repositories, and some may be managed by people outside of the core ops team.
• How do we synchronize the labels? This is the only strictly technical question in this bunch.

[larsks]

https://medium.com/@dave_lunny/sane-github-labels-c5d2e6004b63 has some interesting thoughts on label taxonomy, which is somewhat related to this issue.

[larsks]

There is a label-syncer action for GitHub workflows that seems recently maintained. It's in use by a number of projects. I've submitted a pull request to allow label renaming, which I think we'll need if we decide to adopt a more consistent taxonomy:

micnncim/action-label-syncer#60

[larsks]

This will be very helpful once we resolve #241 (because we can propagate sizing labels to all our repositories).

[larsks]

https://seantrane.com/posts/logical-colorful-github-labels-18230/ also has some interesting thoughts on both taxonomy and color

[larsks]

https://github.com/Financial-Times/github-label-sync#configuration seems a little more feature-complete already

[larsks]

To summarize the related changes here:

• There is a proposal in Propose a common taxonomy for issue and pr labels ops-docs#15
• There is a repository that defines labels in https://github.com/cci-moc/moc-labels
• There is a container image with tooling to manage repository labels in https://github.com/cci-moc/gh-tools-image

[joachimweyl]

@larsks sounds like we should update our taxonomy to include our size labels. Are there any other taxonomy updates we should make?

[larsks]

Agree re: adding size/ labels. I'm not sure I can think of anything else we need.

[joachimweyl]

I have opened #589 to ensure the taxonomy page is up to date. This should not block continuing to research how to do this but it will block the final creation as we need to make sure all repos have the same base label set.

[joachimweyl]

As the taxonomy page modifies some of the labels that already exist such as help wanted becomes flag/help wanted. Will we also have a way to remove these "duplicates"?
I noticed that we have 2 pages that house taxonomy information. moc-labels and taxonomy. Do we really want to maintain two versions?

[larsks]

The policy document is authoritative.

The moc-labels repository contains an implementation (that we're not currently using); documentation there is informative ("this is what this code does"), but it's not a policy.

[hakasapl]

@larsks I can work on deploying https://github.com/Financial-Times/github-label-sync if it's okay with you?

[larsks]

@hakasapl I'm not sure I actually want to go that route. Let me add some updates to this issue this afternoon about alternate tooling.