On Fri, 2011-09-02 at 18:33 -0400, Matt McCutchen wrote:
We clearly want to bugs to be CLOSED, not open with a quasi-closed keyword or whiteboard field.
I'm not sure who "we" is, but I disagree. The generally accepted definition of CLOSED is that the resolution is final unless subsequent events invalidate the original rationale. (C.f. the RHEL policy: "The bug is considered dead, the resolution is correct.") All it takes for an expired bug to be reopened is for someone to have enough interest to retest it in a maintained Fedora version. To claim that this meets the definition of CLOSED is a big stretch. I believe that "expired" should properly be its own major state alongside "open" and "closed", but we have alternatives that are less radical and still solve the immediate problem with search.
The reason for the auto-closing is 'problems with search': developers do not want to have searches for open bugs cluttered up with bugs for ancient versions. Any change which involves not closing the old bugs will result in the auto-close procedure not solving this problem any more, because the bugs will show up in a default search, and - as you mentioned - developers will have to remember to customize their searches every time to cover only currently-active versions. If we were to do that we might as well not do anything to old bugs automatically at all, because it's about as easy to customize a search to 'fedora 14, fedora 15, fedora 16, rawhide' as it is to customize it to 'no bugs with keyword EXPIRED'.