In our JBoss Application Server project (https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBAS) we are well in progress on our seventh major version with several thousand issues historically. Over this time, components (and their default assignees) have changed substantially from what existed in prior versions, making the list of components increasingly stagnant and useless. Some degree of separation between major versions is essential yet it would still be nice to be able to apply an issue to more than one major version, while listing the components affected in each major version (which may differ somewhat between major versions).

The only solution we have is to create a new project for every major version, but this has many downsides.

What would work much better is to have a new field "Major Version" which defines a separate category of components and versions. In other words, each major version ("6.x", "7.x", etc.) would contain a version set ("6.1.0", "6.1.1", etc.) as well as its own set of components.

Please give this issue some consideration - I know that this type of issue has been raised before (in a different form e.g. subcomponents) but hopefully this solution is somewhat more viable.