Evaluating gitlab as an issue tracker, I noticed the default bug states are simply open and closed. How can this list be expanded?
Additional states might be “In Progress”, “Fixed (but not verified)” and “Wont-fix”.
Trying to replicate this with Labels doesn’t work. There no mechanism (that I see) to force a label for each bug and the states should be mutually exclusive anyway (which labels are not).
I don’t believe there’s any way to do exactly what you are suggesting, but usually people do use labels for this, and the issue Kanban boards allow you to have swimlanes based on label matching.
Some people also enforce rules like "each issue has to have a label in the set of {closed, open, wont fix, in progress, ...} by writing a scheduled pipeline which runs gitlab-triage with their own custom policies.
However, if you’re keen for GitLab to have an expanded set of issue states by default, you’d need to raise an issue.
Hi @Rob.Larkin 
In addition to what @snim2 already said, there are a type of labels that are mutually exclusive. Those are the scoped labels, even though those are available only for Premium and Ultimate.
With scoped labels you could have a similar workflow to what is used on GitLab itself, using, for example: