Fences and Bridges
Dag Wieers has some comments about when bug tracking systems become fences instead of bridges. I wish it were so simple to solve this problem, but as Dag and the comments point out, it is more complicated than you would think. Some upstreams want every bug no matter how trivial, some want the distro to filter the bugs, some want NO bugs forwarded whatsoever(!), some want bugs in a mailing list instead of a bug tracker, and the list goes on and on and on. Not to mention that people ebb and flow out of projects so what one maintainer might want is not what a new maintainer might want.
For my part I default to not bugging the upstream unless I notice a large number of bugs that need to go somewhere. Unfortunately there’s been too many instances for me personally where trying to Do the Right Thing(tm) for bugs results in “I am upstream and I won’t fix your Ubuntu bugs”. But that’s ok, we’ve got most of the major projects handled and a personal relationship between the Ubuntu Developer and the upstream. I usually prefer handling this conversation with people face-to-face, for example when I go to GUADEC I make myself a little hitlist of maintainers that might have bugs in Launchpad that they’re not aware of.
There is a scalability problem here obviously, it can’t be just me, or the upstream author, it needs to be a team of people dedicated to this kind of thing. The upstream report has a column for “Upstream Contact”, which is ideally a person who has one foot in Ubuntu and one upstream. That person’s role will include being that “bridge” between upstream and the distro to make sure that bugs, patches, and everything else is moving smoothly back and forth. We discussed this at UDS and I will publish some notes soonish …
EDIT: Yep, alot of red in that upstream contacts column … I’ll be hitting that hard this cycle. 
Jorge: Not sure why you changed blogs, but I’d just like to say I’m very disappointed you’re no longer going with a full RSS feed. I find it very annoying to have to leave my RSS reader to read the posts.
Trying to fix it. I hate the internet. That is all.
I think this is a feature of wordpress, noticed on planet my posts don’t show up in the full RSS reader either. Ping me if you figure it out Jorge.
Jonathan
Maybe you could send a monthly bug digest (automated) to your upstreams. If people think it is spam they can unsubscribe or something.
But I think alerting upstreams of bugs would be the right thing to do and should be the default for all Ubuntu packages (IMNSHO).
Just today I got told to upstream a bug and was wondering the same thing..
I didn’t realize it was so complicated. More upstream contacts would be great.
Ubuntu has more testers than any other platform on the face of this ever-loving earth, and it’s a real shame to waste any of that power; it’s arguably our greatest resource.
This is why Debian has maintainers, to interact with the wider free software community on our behalf. I think Ubuntu should have the same (or just have all Ubuntu folks switch to and join Debian).
Perhaps you could revisit the topic from the point of view that bug tracking systems really are often an obstacle rather than an advantage. These need resources, maintenance, and most of all, time and manpower. Not all ‘upstreams’ are huge ‘communities’ such as Ubuntu or Gnome.
In many settings the ‘old-fashioned’ mailing lists are indeed a much better way to handle bugs and other development issues than often heavy and clumsy web-based interfaces. It is ironical that once a bug tracking system is installed, there needs to be special people to “squash” the bugs by going through all those INVALID or WONTFIX -type bugs so often filed by persons not part of those “bridge people” you mention. All this is away from the time reserved for the actual development.
Cheers, and IMO, of course.