Ian Jackson wrote:
[...] Of course we do need bug reports to be able to tell what's wrong so that we know what to fix. But many packages have so many bug reports that there is already not enough time to deal with them all thoroughly. In that case it is better to cherry-pick the ones which seem to be likely to lead to bugfixes, and close the rest.
There is no need to close all tickets. Those which look too costly can be left for when you or another contributor has more time. Or left open forever.
Ticket severities can already help developers prioritize the tickets to read, to some degree. #704874 requests a real solution for that. This could also be complemented with a per-user "read" ticket status in the web interface... although that would first require to teach the ITS about users :-/