bogus bug reports blocking important packages from entering testing

[Johannes Rohr <j.rohr@gmx.de>]

Hello,

possibly I should post this to debian-devel rather than to
debian-gtk-gnome, but, well I'm not a Debian insider and I don't
want to start a flamewar. Therefore I thought it was a good idea to
post my remarks to a less frequented list first.

I recently looked at bug pages for some packages the testing version
of which is rather outdated, notably mozilla. Mozilla in testing is
still back to 2:1.0.0.woody.1.0. When I read the bug reports that
appear to be the blockers, I found that many of them were rather
unspecific and unreproducible with the latest Mozilla from unstable.

There were several reports saying that "Mozilla sucks and it crashes
on http://wwww.foobar.com";. I visited the mentioned pages and found
that Mozilla 1.2.1 didn't crash at all. Therefore I submitted
additional comments to the respective bug reports, suggesting to close
them.

I find it exeptionally stupid that Mozilla 1.2.1 is kept from entering
testing because 9 months ago or so Mozilla 1.0 crashed on Joe
Randomuser's box while he was visiting myfunkyhomepage.com.

This leads to a deplorable situation where the testing version of
Mozilla is in fact the most unstable and insecure version available in
Debian: Newer releases that fix bugs including security holes are
infinitely blocked from entering testing, not because the newer
version is buggier but because old reports are not cleaned up.

What can one do to remedy this situation? Any comments greatly
appreciated!

Thanks,

Johannes
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