Bugs against withdrawn packages

[Colin Watson <cjw44@flatline.org.uk>]

What happens to bugs filed against packages withdrawn from the
distribution? Do they remain there forever, as a symbol of the eternity
of our Bug Tracking System (to quote Marcus Brinkmann in #740), or is it
legitimate to close them after some long period of time? I realize they
have to stay around for a while in case somebody decides to reintroduce
the package, but there are some really ancient ones in there (#9359, for
instance), and a number of release-critical bugs (berolist has two, for
example - of course, they'd need to be made Severity: serious if the
package were reintroduced).

Since packages are more likely to be withdrawn if they have lots of
serious bugs than if they're bug-free, it seems to me that we ought to
know what to do about those bugs, otherwise we leave a lot of bugs in
the system that nobody will ever fix. Am I being too much of a tidiness
freak? :)

Oh, one case is easy: if one package supersedes another (using
Conflicts:, Replaces:, and Provides:), and the superseded package is
later withdrawn, then it would seem sensible to reassign all the older
package's bugs to the newer package. More care would be required when a
package is split (see, for instance, awe-netscape).

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]