Comment 8 for bug 325982

An interesting conundrum!

Some thoughts:
  - permanent URLs are nice

  - it might be helpful to distinguish between a search URL giving correct results and a search URL giving predictable results.

  - For any given search, there are two possible intents: search for exactly this, or search for what I've specified within the defaults. We don't know which intent any given user has on any given search.

  - doing an advanced search merely for a particular text string gives a URL without enumerated fields, e.g. https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/malone/+bugs?field.searchtext=foo&orderby=-importance&search=Search&assignee_option=any&field.assignee=&field.bug_reporter=&field.bug_supervisor=&field.bug_commenter=&field.subscriber=&field.omit_dupes.used=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.has_patch.used=&field.has_cve.used=&field.tag=&field.tags_combinator=ANY

  - AIUI, the current defaults for status search correspond to "open bugs". If we changed the default, would it be changing the "open" bit (e.g to "open and recently closed") or would it be to change what we mean by "open" (e.g. "fix committed" is no longer open)? If the first, keeping the enums matters more. If the latter, then maybe it doesn't matter quite so much.

  - There are open bugs and compelling arguments for removing some of our current statuses. Surely doing this would break existing search URLs? Surely this is an insufficient reason to keep our current statuses?

  - If we omitted the fields that were set to default values, we could also have add 'permalink' to the search results page. This would allow us to serve both kinds of search intentions.

jml