Marcus Denker <denker at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
> The question is: What do we do with those postings that require more 
> work?
> 
> Just holding all those postings in BFAV forever makes no sense.
> 

As food for thought, I notice that with the Debian tools it actually
does make sense to keep them around.  The ancient bugs don't seem to get
in the way.  The prevent people from endlessly re-filing the same
complaint.  The attached discussion thread provides a pointer to anyone
who wants to work on the problem in the future, and it provides
workarounds for people to use in the meantime.  In short, it's useful
information, and it is nice to keep it around if possible.

One of my packages, audiooss, has a bug against it that has been there
for well over a year.  I want it to stay there, and somehow, it does not
get in my way nor other people's way when we use the bug tracking
system.

I don't know fully how those tools make such ancient bugs stay out of
the way, while ours in Squeak do  not, but I think one part of it is
that the bugs are associated with packages.  You would only see this
particular bug if you are actively trying to look at bugs for package
audiooss.  This heuristic seems quite effective: if you aren't
interested in audiooss, then you definitely aren't interested in this
bug.  If you are interested in audiooss, then there are few enough
audiooss bugs floating around that theres' a good chance this is the one
you are looking for.  To be fair, this heuristic does seem to break down
a little for large, popular packages with many dozens of bug reports. 
The mozilla package, for example, tends to get gazillions of repeated
bug reports onthe same underlying bug, probably because people can't
bring themselves to read through the entire list of existing mozilla
bugs before posting a new on.  (Not to pick on mozilla -- huge, popular
programs inherently have more potential for bugs.)

Lex