apport incorrectly marks duplicates of similar fixed bugs for old packages

[Greg Grossmeier]

Specific case:
gnome-settings-daemon in Karmic is crashing at login. Thus, we are getting a lot of reports of this bug. The same crash symptoms were also in Hardy and Jaunty (at least).

It was first reported in Hardy (bug #254671) and that bug is marked "Fix Released". However, when someone else reports this issue in Karmic it is marked as a duplicate of that bug and all debug information is removed (see, eg, bug #414099)

Proposal:
If apport comes across a backtrace that is the same for an older bug, do not mark it as a duplicate if: 1) the older bug has a status of "Fix Released" and 2) the package version from the older bug is older than this new duplicate.

This will allow bug that come back again to be diagnosed more easily. The only time it will keep the new bugs is when the old bug is marked as Fixed, otherwise marking it as a duplicate is probably the right thing to do.

This is a compromise between two extremes: A) all same backtraces are marked as duplicates of one master bug no matter any other information and B) for each new version of a package there is a new master bug.