Please don't bother setting already-duplicated bugs to Rejected!

[Lex Hider]

On Wednesday 18 October 2006 09:17, Colin Watson wrote:
> In an attempt to be helpful, a bug triager just went through a bunch of
> my bugs that I marked as duplicates of other bugs ages ago, and set the
> Status of all of them to Rejected.
>
> This causes Malone to send huge piles of e-mail to huge numbers of
> people. For each bug you mark as Rejected, it sends an e-mail to every
> subscriber to the duplicate bug *target*, i.e. the master bug (at least,
> this is my belief based on complaints received). In this case, the bug
> target was one of the most-duplicated bugs in Ubuntu, with so many
> subscribers that Malone currently times out trying to display the bug at
> all. The effect is to waste lots of people's time, and bug reporters put
> off ever filing Ubuntu bugs again because of the amount of e-mail they
> get as a result.
>
> More to the point, though, rejecting duplicate bugs is totally
> unnecessary. It's already marked as a duplicate, and excluded from
> Malone searches by default, so why bother? "Rejected" also sends the
> wrong message to a bug reporter who sent a perfectly valid bug report,
> but just happened not to be the first person to do so (or, in some
> cases, not even that; the responsible developer might simply have first
> identified the issue from a different bug). And, if the bug turns out
> not to be a duplicate as previously thought, then messing with the
> status means that there's one more thing to revert when restoring the
> bug's independent existence.
>
> Please don't contribute to the increasing entropy of the universe -
> don't touch the status of duplicate bugs!
>

I was wondering to what extent this could be fixed on the launchpad side. If 
it's a bad idea to reject duplicate bugs, why not make it impossible?

Cheers,

Lex.