BTW question: how expensive is archive/unarchive

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

Hi there,

There are a bunch of bug reports where a bug was fixed in the stable
branch, and for whatever reason it wasn't obvious to BTS that the bug
was fixed in the development branch as well, so it shows a picture like
this:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/version.cgi?info=1;absolute=0;fixed=e2fsprogs%2F1.41.12-3;collapse=1;found=e2fsprogs%2F1.41.11-1;package=e2fsprogs

Since it was marked "done", the bug report has been marked archived, so
I can't just send a command:

fixed 588726 e2fsprogs/1.42~WIP-2011-07-02-01

I'd instead have to do this:

unarchive 588726
fixed 588726 e2fsprogs/1.42~WIP-2011-07-02-01
archive 588726

How expensive is this?  Is archive/unarchive just a flag to prevent
spam from getting entered into the bug report, or something more?

Also, I found the following in the HowToUseBTS archive:

   "Because bug reports can get archived after 28 days if they fulfil
   some criteria: usually bugs have to get fixed both in unstable and in
   testing to get archived."

So it's a bit annoying that I need to go in and manually mark all of
these bugs as fixed in a historical release --- but given that BTS
thinks that both unstable and testing still have these bugs marked as
unfixed, why were they archived in the first place?

	     	       		       - Ted