[dart-misc] A better-organized issue tracker

['Bob Nystrom' via Dart Misc]

Greetings, Dartisans!

Over the years, the issue tracker for the main SDK repo
<https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues> has grown and grown like an
untended garden, weeds and tendrils spreading everywhere. It reached a
point where it's hard for us to tell what's going on and certainly hard for
you all to.

A handful of team members spent time closing and cleaning up piles of old
stale issues. We used to be over 5k open and now we're down to 4,185.
There's still a lot of chaff in there, but that's approaching a
maintainable number as long as we keep an eye on it.

Another key part of extracting meaning from the issue tracker is
understanding what the various labels indicate. Despite having literally
over 200 labels at a peak, we've never written down what any of them mean.
As you can imagine, that doesn't lead to much enlightenment.

I went through and killed a bunch of dead labels, merged redundant ones,
and renamed them to be consistent. There's still more work to be done, but
it's a step. Even better, I wrote a doc *explaining* what the labels mean
and how we use them:

https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/wiki/How-the-issue-tracker-works

I hope that helps you all better understand what we're up to. If you have
any questions, let us know.

Cheers!

– bob