Giallu,

I can see where your coming from, but I think trying to change this behaviour will cause more hassle then it's worth:

a) remember that at the moment you can use a ~ to link to a bug note, so in theory 0000003:0000001 4034 should present a link to bug note 14034: 0007761:0014034

b) Lets say you add 5 notes to a bug. Note 5 says "I completely agree that should implement this as describe in note 2 but definitely not the solution describe in note 3".
At this point, one of two things happens: a) An admin comes along and deletes note 1. b) the user that submitted note 1 either edits or deletes not 1.

You'd then be in a situation where either
i) you have notes numbers 2,3,4,5
ii) you have notes numbers 1,2,3,4 and the last note is now proposing a different solution to when it was originally typed.

It might be possible to improve the display, but for the reasons stated above, you might find that it may be more sensible to leave 'as is'.

I wonder if there would be any benefit to adding a #view_bugnote_id_threshold config variable, such that normal users can not see the number - i'm thinking companies that want to hide how active or inactive developers are.

In terms of the ~ syntax, I'm sure it would be possible to change that to say ~noteid@bugid or similar to allow the current behaviour.

I don't see the return on investment for this work. The thing that would be hard to fix is that if we implement this we are likely to break all ~ existing links in current installations. Hence, the work around would be to support both modes. But then, we will have to maintain them both.

Hence, I don't think we should go for it. This reminds me of the request to have all projects start with bug number 1, which we always rejected.

to grangeway:

a) I don't understand this... :P

b) In general, I think we shouldn't allow deleting stuff. That said, I share your worries about the situation you describe, and the solution I am planning would surely be robust enough to not break in that (common) scenario

to vboctor:
Of course I agree this is not a "smash hit" feature, so the ROI looks low, but IMHO it should be done.

We use sequential numbers because numbers have a meaning: if the last bug reported is 8200 and I'm looking at 2077, I already know that's something "ancient".
If you have five notes in a report, you mentally say "I will reply to the first" and not "I will reply to 15281".
For example, bug 0004617 has, right now, 21 notes: are you able to tell at first glance where is note 7903? is it any better if I tell you it's note 7 ?

I think there is a great difference between this and the "restart bug numbering on each project"; that request is driven by the wrong reasoning, becasue they believe the user perceived quality is related to a low issue number.
I'm sure they would appreciate if we could use 1 for each and every bug report, or, even better, a random alphanumeric sequence so there is no relation at all with the number of open issues...
Who gets how tracking is all about, is proud about hitting 500000 bugs (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/20.html)