Closed bugs are available for direct search for 30 days after they're closed.
After that you can still search them by selecting either "Archived" or "Archived and Unarchived" under "Misc Options" on the search page.
All that aside, in this particular case I closed the bug because
it wasn't actually a bug, but rather a PEBKAC issue (user
complaining that a program wasn't respecting his locale when he
had LC_ALL set to "C" so he was essentially telling the program to
ignore his locale).
jik
* Jonathan Kamens <jik@kamens.us> [230925 07:17]:Hi all, I recently tried to close a bug, explain why, and set a "wontfix" tag all at once by sending my explanation to ###-done@bugs.debian.org with "Control: tags ### wontfix" as the first line of my message body. The bug was closed but the tags command wasn't processed.I've seen differing opinions about closing "wontfix" bugs, but as a user, I appreciate when they are left open. Whether it is a simple wishlist feature request or a crash when the user abuses the software, if I go to file the same or similar bug at a later time, if the bug is closed I will not see it and file a duplicate. If it is left open, I can see the maintainer has already thought about it and intentionally decided not to fix it, so I can save the trouble of refiling. Also, I might gain some insight about the circumstances. ...Marvin