QEP-2 adoption: standard label set rollout

[mmcky]

QEP-2 — Standard GitHub Label Set and Labelling Policy — was Accepted on 2026-08-08 (QuantEcon/qeps#2, recorded in QuantEcon/qeps#10). This is the sequenced execution tracker its Adoption section defers to, so that completing, reordering, or dropping a step never requires amending the standard.

This issue is a sub-issue parent: it carries no Type label by design, per QEP-2's own rule that a tracker is structure, not work.

What the standard fixes: 19 core labels, a lecture extension (new-lecture, editor), and a one-label software extension (refactor) — names, colours, and descriptions defined normatively in qep-0002-labels.yml. Adoption is a migration, not an addition: variants are renamed in place so issue and PR history survives, and every sync emits a migration report.

1. Tooling — qe gh labels sync

The CLI reads the co-located appendix from qeps and owns the operational mappings (rename variants, retired-label handling, pruning), which the QEP deliberately does not record. Already decomposed in QuantEcon/cli:

• QuantEcon/cli#8 — conform existing labels: recolour and rename, not only create missing
• QuantEcon/cli#7 — migrate tags when multiple aliases merge into one canonical label (re-tag before delete)
• QuantEcon/cli#9 — emit a migration report, one disposition per non-standard label
• QuantEcon/cli#10 — --suggest: propose per-issue Type labels where a legacy label fans out
• QuantEcon/cli#6 — scheduled drift check on cron
• QuantEcon/cli#5 — qe gh bots check: verify the automation label contract
• QuantEcon/cli#11 — qe gh subissue / qe gh blocked-by helpers for the native features QEP-2 prescribes
• QuantEcon/cli#3 — qe gh profile apply|check: compose labels + settings per repo type
• QuantEcon/cli#4 — qe gh repo onboard
• QuantEcon/cli#2 — qe gh settings sync
• QuantEcon/cli#12 — remove the duplicate data/labels.yml, read the schema from the QEP appendix

Blocking for the pilot: #8, #7, #9. The rest can land after.

These ten issues were audited against the accepted standard on 2026-08-08; corrections are recorded as comments on each. QuantEcon/cli#12 was filed by that audit.

2. Pilot

• Pilot lecture-python-programming (target settled in Decision: standard GitHub label set for QuantEcon lecture repositories #324), review its migration report before widening

3. Widening

• Remaining lecture-* repos (core 19 + lecture extension = 21)
• Software / tooling repos (core 19 + refactor = 20)
• meta itself — takes the core 19 default; its local project and education labels are resolved by the migration like any other non-standard label, not held as a standing exception
• qeps — still on the pre-QEP-2 ad-hoc set, including three status labels the standard retires

Out of scope per QEP-2: translation forks (translate:*) and *.notebooks build repos.

4. Org defaults

• Set the org-level default label set for new repositories to the core 19 — a manual settings change, as there is no public API for org defaults

5. Bot conformance

QEP-2 requires every bot-opened issue or PR to carry automated plus at most one diagnostic. Three known non-conformances, carried over from QuantEcon/qeps#3:

• action-check-warnings emits execution / python-warnings, which exist nowhere in the standard → automated + build-failure
• action-link-checker is missing automated → automated + broken-links
• action-activity-report (tools/highlights.py) — drop dead aliases (feature, priority: high, chore, docs), correct the now-false "infrastructure no longer exists" note, and settle discuss / low-priority handling

Dependabot is not on this list. Settled 2026-08-08: its labels belong to the automation, not to QEP-2's contract. QEP-2 defines the label dependencies — name, colour, description — and what a bot applies to its own output is automation behaviour, which is QEP-4's subject (QuantEcon/qeps#8, draft). labels: [dependencies] in .github/dependabot.yml is correct as-is and needs no change.

6. Close the earlier unification attempts

• GitHub Org - Unified Labels #178 — GitHub Org · Unified Labels
• Standardized Labels for QuantEcon Repositories #290 — Standardized Labels for QuantEcon Repositories

Both are superseded by QEP-2. Close them once the pilot confirms the migration works, not before — they are the fallback record if it does not.

Feeding amendments back

A label recorded as unmapped across several repos is a gap in the set, and closing it is a normal in-place amendment under QEP-1 that bumps QEP-2's version. The bar is recurrence: one repo's oddity is a local exception; the same label unmapped in four repos is a missing label. Migration reports produce the evidence; proposing the amendment stays a human judgement.

Note that QEP-4 (QuantEcon/qeps#8, draft) will re-apply its parked registry hooks to QEP-2 in its own acceptance PR, which will move QEP-2 to version: 1.