I agree in general with this proposal.
From my perspective as triager, I think, that the known issue report definition could be modified. Currently it practically covers “won’t fix” reports like for modules that are EOL. These could be probably closed. However reports for unmaintained modules should be kept, since module status may change in the future.
In any case, it would be good to be able to tell, whether the report was closed as a result of new policy, a fix, or some other means.
From my perspective as developer, I use known issue type mainly to communicate to others, that the issue is more complex, than it looks and it needs some coordination and planning to resolve it. For VSE most of known issues were fixed without looking at these reports and in some cases I forgot, that they were even reported. So if these would be closed, I wouldn’t mind so much.
Would this mean, that report with medium priority (assuming it is default) and no milestone attached would mean “Eventually this could/would be fixed”? I think, that in practice, user would still wonder whether there will be some milestone attached to the report and hope would be lost with passing time.
Back in phabricator days, if I did not fix the issue within a month, chances that issue would be fixed goes down drastically. Now, if I am not tagged in new report, there is good chance, that I may overlook it, especially if I am working on some complex task. But sometimes, I wonder what users think of issues open for long time, and whether it could be communicated to them, what is the chance or timeframe of fix.
For VSE issues I sometimes explicitly commented in the report whether this is simple fix or would need more work. I did this as a part of report classification, where I did reproduce it and looked at what actually went wrong. But I have never specified any timeframe.
For release planning, milestones do make sense, even though I rarely used them. To me adding these to PR’s makes more sense, than for reports.
@Nurb2Kea Your steps would be great for running team, that does purely maintenance and to get number of bugs closer to 0. But I am not sure that is the goal of this proposal.