Q:

How do you unassign a bug in Bugzilla (NEW vs. REOPENED)?

You might know it: Working on ASSIGNED bug(s), and suddenly a task appears that is

absolutely important and has to be done first. 

In this moment I'm unable to predict how long this will take, maybe very long. So I better update the state of the bug(s) I'm working on to something other than ASSIGNED: maybe a college of mine has the the time and skill to fix it (or some of them).
My observation is that NEW looks odd, since there was some work done on it. REOPENED on the other hand looks too much after a bug that has been stated to be fixed but in fact wasn't. Is there a state missing in the standard settings that I have to add myself?
I'm looking for a common practice for this in Bugzilla, but I had no success so far - googling bug, bugzilla etc. and getting something meta obviously overburdens me. What's your advice?

A:

At Mozilla, different teams use Bugzilla differently, but it is common to set the status to ASSIGNED only when you are actively working on the bug.  So in your case, it does sound like resetting to NEW would be a good choice.
Something else you could consider is setting the priority field.  It would be fairly clear to anyone looking at your bug queue that you would usually be working on a P1 task before a P2 task, or at least spending more of your time on the former.

