Why do some bugs stay RESOLVED/LATER for years?
As quoted from Bug 157642 Comment 14: For most committers, there is an effectively unlimited supply of available bug reports and enhancement requests. How they choose what to work on is effectively a cost/benefit analysis. Cost in this case is the amount of work to address it, the work of ongoing maintenance for a new feature, the ripple cost a new feature may have on downstream projects, performance cost, etc. Things that increase the “benefit” side include benefits for end-users of Eclipse applications, benefits for downstream projects, etc. Also, input from the community in the form of votes, and input from the PMC and from committers on other projects increase the “benefit” side of the equation. A long-dormant bug may be reopened either because the cost has gone down (perhaps some underlying infrastructure is now available that makes the problem easier to solve), or the benefit has gone up (more requests from users, committers on other projects, the PMC, etc). If the cost/benefit r
