Further to #10250 we have two types of reference between issues:

duplicates¶

duplicated by¶

Apparently changed in #10250 to:

is duplicate of¶

has duplicate¶

I am frankly not sure whether the new wording helps me understand which to use in a given situation. I really would not care except for a nasty side effect that bites me all the time.

Having found two duplicate issues and tagging them, I close the one I no longer want in my system. In theory it should be the later one, but of the later one has more detailed steps to reproduce or is already in progress, I may close the older task, it does not really matter.

However depending which of these two states I applied where (ie in which direction the ambiguous semantics point) about 50% of the time BOTH tasks get closed. If you have a task which is (I think) the second of these options and you close it, ALL duplicates are closed at the same time.

This is, frankly, out of character for Redmine. There are almost no other situations where issues affect each other like this. Even closing a Group task does not close its subtasks (thankfully).

MY request is to:

Remove this behaviour; OR¶

At a minimum prompt first - remind the user how many issues will be closed by their action.¶

I have been bitten many times by this, and only realised what has happened about half the time which is scary.