I submitted a bug report, 171295, to KDE's bugzilla. The bug report is about making the shortcut system support a variety of hardware devices, including mouse, lirc, bluetooth, and others.

However, it looks like someone went through and closed my bug report and a bunch of others as being duplicates of bug 96431, which is about using mouse buttons (and only mouse buttons) as shortcuts. My bug report does include mouse buttons, but it includes a lot of other things as well. I was under the impression a bug is a duplicate of another bug if fixing the first bug would also fix the second one. Fixing bug 96431, however, would not fix my bug (although fixing my bug would fix bug 96431).

So I am thinking that marking it as a duplicate is a mistake. The bugs are not the same, far from it. However, I am hesitant to re-open it because I am not sure it is within my authority (even if I might be technically allowed to). I thought it would be best to check with the person who closed the bug. However, over the last 2 months the person who closed the bug has not responded to several requests from me and one from someone else to clarify why the bug was considered a duplicate. So since I can't get in touch with him, my options are to either to leave it as a duplicate of a bug it is not a duplicate of, or re-open it myself. Would someone in my position re-opening it be considered wrong?

Since your bug report is clearly not a duplicate, I would recommend reopening it.

Zarin: Why is that bug a duplicate?

You are right; it's not a duplicate. If the admin (Which was me in this case) doesn't respond to your challenge you can take it into your own hands and reopen.

It seems I somehow missed the mail when you added me to the CC so I must apologize. My only excuse is that I get around 50 to 100 bug messages a day that I must process before they build up and as such do make mistakes from time to time while rushing through them.

Okay, thanks. It is fine that you missed it. I just didn't want to overstep my (non-existent) authority.