Bugzilla used to allow people to reopen bugs. If fact, adding any comment to a closed bug (at least - by a non-proveleged person like me) was reopening it. I just added some comments to bug #7161, but that didn't reopen it (while I hoped it would be reopened).
Bug 7161 shows you as the reporter of the bug so you should have had a box containing the radio button to reopen the bug. If you see that box at all and you just add a comment then it does not automatically reopen it. I am discussing with others now whether to have the bug automatically reopen when a non-reporter/assigned to person adds a comment to a bug but until then only the reporter, assigned to, or a privileged person such as Red Hat personnel can reopen it. If a public person adds a comment the reporter will still get email updates about it and they can reopen it themselves if convinced to do so.
In the previous version of Bugzilla the rado button did exist, but had only one option - "Reopen this report" (or something similar). Since there was no other option available, it was always selected (I believe it is different in Netscape/Windows, but in Netscape/X11 the only selectbutton option is always selected), so the end result was - adding any comment to close report opened it. But in the current verison of Bugzilla I do not see any way of reopening bug reports, even ones that I have reported (for example, I could not reopen neither bug #7161, nor bug #7203).
Ok, i think i have this one fixed also. Please try to bring up reports that you have created. You should now see the option to reopen the bug. Thanks.
I just opened the bug #41 (path in Bugzilla cookies) and it worked almost fine. But there are several problems: 1) Repopening the bug didn't clean the "Resolution" field, which it probably should do. 2) When I reopen a bug, it still has the old "Assigned To" field. This should be OK for most case, but when somebody reopens a really old bug (like #41), the "Assigned To" field may be really outdated. Do you think somethjing should be done about it? 3) "Change State or Resolution" menu currently has a "Mark bug as VERIFIED" in it. Do you think reporters should have it in their menus?
3b) "Accept bug (change status to ASSIGNED)" shouldn't be there neither. I am not sure about "Reassign bug ...". But IMHO "Resolve bug..." should stay - this would allow people to close their bug reports when they realize that the "bug" was a result if their mistakes or if the bug was fixed in later version of a package.
1) Leaving the last resolution is helpful from a developers standpoint because if there are many choices of resolution, they can see what the last developer (or themselves) closed it under. If you notice there is also a new choice from the old bugzilla that will "Clear the resolution (remove the current resolution of blah)" which will leave it as only REOPENED similar to the way the old system was. 2) Number 2 is a good point. Currently a REOPENED bug retains whatever assigned_to status the bug currently has as you stated. It should in the near future poll the current list of package owners and see if the default owner has changed and update accordingly. As a workaround the "Reassign bug to owner of selected component" choice will currently accomplish the same thing but it is unfortunately an extra step. I will put this on my request list. 3) The way Bugzilla currently allows/disallows bug changes is by reporter/assigned_to/privileged which is why you see the "Accept bug", "Mark as verified", etc. I hope to have more security and flexibility in what choices can be made and by who. This requires alot more database lookups and would make a bug report display slower. But it is currently on my todo list.