[development] {Short issue queues need care - 7} Why we shouldn't close all issues without proper review.

[Gary Feldman]

Bèr Kessels wrote:
> We might need alternative States, or else additional metadata to enhance 
> maintainability. But "closed" is a state! It tells us that an issue is closed 
> (doh). "has been open for too long" could be a flag on an issue, it might 
> even lead to closing at some point (the issue is for 80% fixed in Drupal 4.7, 
> please update your 3.2 version to 4.7) but is never the same as "closed". 
>   
"Deferred" and "Won't Fix" are commonly used issue states.  Others 
achieve the same effect by having a priority of "trivial" or similar, 
with the understanding that issues below a certain priority almost never 
get fixed. 

But it strikes me that an obvious first thing to do is to add a "search 
by date" to the issue tracker.  Specifically being able to search by the 
creation date, last update date, and last state change date, with both 
earliest and latest fields possible.  I've never looked at the tracker's 
data schema, but I'd expect the first two to be relatively 
straightforward while the last could require an additional field.  Once 
you have the ability to filter by dates, there's less need to close old 
issues arbitrarily.

Gary