With such old bugs I often wonder whether it's not best to simply close them. Few people will browse them and many will be "accidentally" closed by reworking of different subsystems. But if they are still relevant somebody will file it, again. If not reopened it's probably not a problem anymore.
The problem with that is the dismissal of the time investment by the original filer who may have spent a significant amount of time getting reproducible steps, screenshots, and other relevant information into the bug. It treats users' time as free.
I think there's a subtle but important distinction between _closing_ the old bugs outright, and leaving them open but marking them as "Verify" with a comment like "we're not sure but it may have been fixed with recent work - can anyone confirm if it's still reproducible?"
I've opened a few bugs, mostly surrounding extensions. Bugs from the XUL days still exist today, even though the UI is different and the API is different and everything. It is somewhat astonishing. I filed most of them over 10 years ago.
So no, just closing them because they'll be accidentally fixed isn't the correct argument IMHO. Instead, they should just admit that most stuff will never get fixed and just clutters the list. Even though that hurts.
Yeah, jwz might be a bit weird at times but he is right on this. I don't understand what problem closing bugs solves. If you want to close a bug, check if it doesn't reproduce. And if it doesn't reproduce, give the author the chance to confirm.
A bug report is documentation. It is valuable. It's a gift. If written well enough of course.
If you feel open bug reports clutters your bug tracker, first I would suggest you are watching them from the wrong perspective, and second I would suggest you might need to take advantage of some triage / organization tool (better) like labels or projects.
Open issue doesn't mean "planned" or "will look into this".
Saying this as a software developer. Who has also been reporting some number of issues. Reporting takes time.
