ci(stale): drop phantom priority/critical exempt label

[yuanchen8911]

Summary

Removes priority/critical from exempt-issue-labels in .github/workflows/stale.yaml, and the matching line from the comment block above it. No such label exists in this repository, so the entry can never match.

Also corrects that same comment block's one-line description of do-not-merge, which understated the exemption in the way #1921 just fixed in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Motivation / Context

This is a proposal, not a settled decision. priority/critical is inert either way — an unmatched exempt label simply never fires — so there are two defensible resolutions, and this PR implements one of them:

• Delete the dead entry (this PR), if lifecycle/frozen is the intended freeze mechanism.
• Create the label, if "never goes stale for critical issues" is wanted policy — in which case the config was right and the label is what was missing. Closing this PR is how that option gets chosen; the label would then be created through repo settings, with no code change needed here.

The decisive point is that actions/stale can only match label names. It has no access to Projects v2 fields. Priority in this repo lives on the AICR project board as a Priority field (P0/P1/P2), not as repo labels, which is why no priority/* label was ever created. So creating priority/critical would not give board-P0 issues automatic exemption — someone would still hand-apply the label to each one. That collapses it into a synonym for lifecycle/frozen, which already exists, already sits in the same exempt-issue-labels list, and already covers pull requests too via exempt-pr-labels.

The trade-off is therefore not "protection versus no protection" — it is "one way to freeze an issue, or two."

Why fix it at all, given it is inert. The entry is documentation-shaped. The comment at :26 reads as a statement of policy, and it is where the incorrect CONTRIBUTING.md claim originated. #1921 removed that claim from the docs; this removes the source. Left alone, the next person auditing the workflow re-documents it and the same error returns.

Evidence: gh api repos/NVIDIA/aicr/labels --paginate returns no priority/* label of any kind. The other two exempt labels, lifecycle/frozen and good first issue, both exist and work.

Fixes: N/A
Related: #1920, #1921

This addresses one bullet of #1920 and deliberately does not close it — that issue also covers the aicr-triage Close-bucket label rule and the "Stalled" naming collision, both of which are independent follow-ups.

Type of Change

• Bug fix (non-breaking change that fixes an issue)
• New feature (non-breaking change that adds functionality)
• Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)
• Documentation update
• Refactoring (no functional changes)
• Build/CI/tooling

Component(s) Affected

• CLI (cmd/aicr, pkg/cli)
• API server (cmd/aicrd, pkg/server)
• Recipe engine / data (pkg/recipe)
• Bundlers (pkg/bundler, pkg/component/*)
• Collectors / snapshotter (pkg/collector, pkg/snapshotter)
• Validator (pkg/validator)
• Core libraries (pkg/errors, pkg/k8s)
• Docs/examples (docs/, examples/)
• Other: .github/workflows/stale.yaml

Implementation Notes

No behavior change. The removed label never matched, so no issue's staleness handling differs before or after. lifecycle/frozen and good first issue continue to exempt issues; lifecycle/frozen and do-not-merge continue to exempt pull requests.

The do-not-merge comment was understated. exempt-pr-labels (:80) is actions/stale's exemption list, so an exempt PR is never marked stale — it receives neither the lifecycle/stale label nor the warning comment. It is not merely spared the close. "PR won't be closed" is precisely the framing #1921 replaced in CONTRIBUTING.md ("To prevent auto-close" → "To stay out of the stale process entirely") for this same mechanism, so leaving it would have put the workflow comment and the documentation in disagreement about the same behavior — the drift this PR exists to prevent.

Scope is deliberately narrow: three lines, all inside the same comment block or the config entry it describes. The documentation half was fixed separately in #1921, and the aicr-triage skill changes from #1920 belong in their own PR against the skill file.

One adjacent gap left alone. The comment block still omits good first issue, so it remains an incomplete summary of :66 after this change. That is incompleteness rather than an incorrect statement, which is why it is treated differently from the do-not-merge wording above. Happy to add it if a reviewer prefers the block be exhaustive.

Reversible. If a maintainer later decides critical issues warrant a dedicated exemption, restoring it is one API call to create the label plus these two lines back. Deleting a dead string forecloses nothing.

Testing

actionlint .github/workflows/stale.yaml   # passes
git grep -n 'priority/critical'           # no matches remain in the tree

make qualify was not run: this changes one CI workflow file and no Go, YAML-under-test, or documentation source, so the repository gate cannot regress from it. The relevant check is actionlint, which passes locally and also runs in CI on .github/** changes.

Risk Assessment

• Low — Isolated change, well-tested, easy to revert
• Medium — Touches multiple components or has broader impact
• High — Breaking change, affects critical paths, or complex rollout

Rollout notes: No migration. The removed entry had no effect, so the stale bot behaves identically before and after.

Checklist

• Tests pass locally (make test with -race) — N/A, no Go changes; actionlint passes
• Linter passes (make lint) — actionlint clean on the changed file
• I did not skip/disable tests to make CI green
• I added/updated tests for new functionality
• I updated docs if user-facing behavior changed — the doc half landed separately in docs: correct issue/PR lifecycle table, fix reminder dedupe #1921
• Changes follow existing patterns in the codebase
• Commits are cryptographically signed (git commit -S) — GPG signing info

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📥 Commits

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📒 Files selected for processing (1)

• .github/workflows/stale.yaml

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

Updated the stale-management workflow to remove priority/critical from documented and configured issue exemptions. Issues labeled lifecycle/frozen or good first issue remain exempt.

Estimated code review effort: 1 (Trivial) | ~2 minutes

Possibly related issues

• NVIDIA/aicr 1920 — Directly addresses the same stale-issue exemption policy change.

Possibly related PRs

• NVIDIA/aicr#1921 — Updates lifecycle guidance related to the same exemption policy.

Suggested reviewers: lockwobr, njhensley, dims

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4

✅ Passed checks (4 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly describes removing the phantom priority/critical exempt label from the stale workflow.
Description check	✅ Passed	The description matches the workflow change and explains the label removal and comment correction.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

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