I proposed it september 2005, but we never implemented it: I think it would be good to close all bugs which are reported as soon as there is a new major release.

We now face a bugzilla which is poluted with an enormous amount of bugs. We have a couple of bughunters which try to keep it neat and tidy and without duplicates, but some reports are really silly. Btw: give the bughunters a cookie when you meet them, I don’t know how they keep it up.

So why close all those bugs? The silly ones need no explanation. Sometimes bugs are not understandable or not reproducable. With the arrival of KDE4 you can ask yourself what the rate would be of successfully reproducing bugs which are reported in KDE3 or even older versions of KDE.

Should we at least try to reproduce? No, of course not. Say there are 10 developers and 100 users. It would be logical that the users try to report clear bugreports, make sure it is confirmed by another user and reproducable. The 10 developers can pick up the confirmed bugs and solve them. Saving so much precious time. The group of users is always bigger then the group of developers. The biggest part of the bug (the clear reporting) should be done by them.

Isn’t it unfair to the user who reported them? Again no. We deliver software to them, we don’t ask money or anything else in return.
We just kindly ask to re-open any closed bugs which still exists after a major release. Do you think that is too much to ask?

Summary: I would vote for closing all bugs after we release RC1, users can reopen their bugs when they see that bug still exists in KDE4. This way developers have a clear view of valid bugs.