Status Clarification: Why We Close Some Issues as “Not Planned”

[lauren-ciha]

Hi WinAppSDK Community,

We’re performing a focused triage of our issue backlog to give you clearer visibility into what the team is actively planning to address.

As part of this effort, feature requests that fall outside the current planning cycle will be marked Closed – not planned. This does not mean the request has been rejected, we will revisit all feature requests closed in this way on a semi-annual basis and reopen any that align with the team’s updated priorities.

What we’re doing:

• Reviewing every community feature request against current team goals and focus areas.
• Closing Feature Requests as “Closed - not planned” that do not fit within the current planning.
• Re-evaluating closed feature requests twice a year to determine whether they should be reopened.

Impact on GitHub community:

• Better signal on what’s being worked on. Open issues represent work the team intends to target in the near term, making it easier for contributors to focus their efforts where impact is most likely.
• Your feedback still matters on closed issues. Comments, upvotes, and additional context on closed feature requests directly inform whether and when they are reopened. Contributors are encouraged to provide further feedback on closed feature requests, or the change in status itself.

Next Steps:

• We continue to monitor all feature requests; open and closed.
• We continue to re-evaluate closed feature requests occasionally, as customer feedback and shifting technology direction continue to reshape our priorities.
• We do appreciate everyone’s feedback on this topic, please feel free to share additional feedback, both about the feature request itself or this clean-up effort.

[whiskhub]

Could this not be solved in a less intrusive way using labels, or the Projects Backlog feature of GitHub (like the WinUI repo has introduced)?

Otherwise the community will not know which issues are "not planned" because of priorities, or because out of scope of WinAppSDK (OS feature requests), or because it's a useless feature request, ...

[JanRajnoha]

Are you planning to do any new roadmap? Because it would be more useful. What are you planning for version X, for version Y, slowly checking what is done, share publicly dates for ideas deadline, ...

[danielgruethling]

to give you clearer visibility

This is not a good approach. Closed issues are filtered out of search results by default. Only when the user specifically removes that filter they will find issues related to their concerns. This will cause less visibilty.

This will only lead to a lot of duplicates and cause more work for maintainers and users.

I suggest using the features github already provides (labels and milestones) so issues can be put on backlogs to review them later.

Especially when you plan to revisit them semi-annually, the milestone approach makes a lot more sense, because then it is also easily visible to everyone when that issue will be reviewed again.