One would expect
forcemerge A B
to cause
pkgreport.cgi?package=X
to list A, not B.
I mean B gets A's version, etc.

OK maybe pkgreport.cgi always lists the lower numbered bug no matter
what.

Well https://www.debian.org/Bugs/server-control#forcemerge should
mention that.
B> Bug #970076 [ppp] Update to work with systemd-resolved
B> Bug #968589 [ppp] PPP name resolver not restarted upon upgrade
B> Merged 968589 970076

OK but wasn't 970076 the master, 968589 the slave?
Why does https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?package=ppp now
only list the slave?
Yes, it is merged with the master but one would expect to see the
master there.

OK, now trying
Bug #968589 [ppp] PPP name resolver not restarted upon upgrade
Bug #970076 [ppp] Update to work with systemd-resolved
Bug #970076 [ppp] Update to work with systemd-resolved
Merged 968589 970076

Didn't help.
Well all I can do at this point is

severity 970210 important
thanks

I agree with Dan. I've just forcemerged 979575 979549 979565, and then
marked 979575 as affecting a few packages, for example ifrench.
When I was doing this, I expected 979575 to be the "master" bug, that
will be displayed in bug pages for both ispell and affected packages.
In other words I thought that ifrench's bugs page would list this bug:

 #979575 ispell 3.4.01 breaks affix files of igerman98 and hkgerman

but it unfortnatelly lists the following one, what seems to have less sense to
me:

 #979549 [S|UPu|=☣] [ispell] ingerman: Problems during ispell-autobuild

Regards,
robert

retitle 970210 repeatmerged=no can't be configured to show a bug other than the lowest numbered bug
severity 970210 wishlist
tag 970210 wontfix
thanks
required to be equal and then merge the bugs.

The documentation is pretty clear: "Forcibly merges two or more bug
reports. The settings of the first bug listed which must be equal in a
normal merge are assigned to the bugs listed next. To avoid typos
erroneously merging bugs, bugs must be in the same package. "

It doesn't cause a bug to be listed when repeatmerged=no, change the
title, or anything like that.

Hope that clarifies things a bit.

severity 970210 important
thanks

Don Armstrong pisze:

It's not a wishlist, it's a bug, as the current behavior, that is based
on some strange assumption that a report filled first is always better
than a report filled later, is just against the common sense.
I know that the things have like this for ages, and everybody got used
to it, and got used to having to work-around it by changing the title of
merged reports, but still I consider this as a bug.

IMHO nothing here says which bug will be displayed as the "main" bug.

Bug report is not only about settings and title, but also its
contents... For example if one bug report contains only information that
something does not work, but the other bug report provides also some
analysis or work-around, than it is obvious to me which of them we
should prefer.
And similarly in the ispell case, https://bugs.debian.org/979575
provides more information than your arbitrarily chosen
https://bugs.debian.org/979549 .

And I hope I convinced you to actually fix this bug.

Regards,
robert