Infrastructure

As discussed repetitively - locking priority/severity from regular users would have a lot of benefits:

*Give these fields some meaning and at least quasi-uniformity

• Build trust within developer community that they can use these fields;
• Replace MAB list which I think come with a ton of issues (most notabily: (1) work for QA every time a version gets EOL; (2) false expectations by users who think 'my bug made it to MAB list now it's SURELY going to be fixed quickly; (3) bad PR - hard to explain how a bug made it to MAB list but hasn't been fixed in 12+ months; (4) avoiding the issue of removing a bug from the MAB list after a long time and telling the user "sorry this isn't really that annoying")

Obviously outside of my area of expertise but I have poked a few people on the bugzilla mailing list and got some pointers:

http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.4/en/html/cust-change-permissions.html (note it says experimental but I've been told that isn't really true by people on the mailng list - that it's said that for a long time and just hasn't been updated)
http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.4/en/html/api/Bugzilla/Extension.html
http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.4/en/html/api/Bugzilla/Hook.html#bug_check_can_change_field

Furthermore I got this response from someone with additional thoughts:

The message about that's it experimental has been there for years now,
but this functionality has not been changed since then and was
recommended for wishes like yours all the time, even by core devs. So
it's quite save to use, the only thing you should consider is to
create an extension instead of hacking Bugzilla core code, because the
check_can_change_field logic has been made available as a hook as well
in the meantime. This hook is not marked experimental and creating an
extension only needs slightly more overhead, but will keep your
changes a lot more maintainable.

Lastly - let me say I don't necessarily expect a paid employee to tackle this - that's why it's unfortunate that this is on redmine instead of bugzilla because this is much less transparent to the wider community (and other QA members who may have the skills to implement). I will likely report a bugzilla report that duplicates this message (sigh) in order to attempt to get more eyes looking at it. It looks like with the pointers it's likely a QA Easy Hack