We have setup, as part of our work in Helios, a very early demonstrator of a database of RDF facts about bugs in several distributions (currently Debian and Mandriva), in order to try and validate the Ontology describing bugs that we develop.
Here’s a pointer to the first webcast on fetchbugs4.me’s blog, with more details.
… well, at least on my machine 
The goal is to be able to track remote bugs with bts-link even for your own list of (private) bugs that are not in debbugs (see also prevous post about this idea we work on in the Helios project).
Now, I have some bugs in Mantis, and I add a snippet like the following into one of its notes :
*** bts-link-mantis variables ***
Forwarded-To: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
*** end bts-link-mantis ***
And starting from that point, bts-link is able to monitor the (remote) Debian bug it refers to, and notify people subscribed to the local Mantis bug.
When running and if the Debian bug status changes, it will add (via SOAP) another note with, for instance :
This is a note generated by bts-link :
remote status report for 0000029
* http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
* remote status changed: (?) -> pending
*** bts-link-mantis variables ***
Forwarded-To: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
User-Tags: status-pending
*** end bts-link-mantis ***
The same principle would work with almost any bugtracker even if they don’t support forwarded-to tags or any similar remote bug tracking mechanism natively.
The code is here (git), for the curious ones.
EDIT 2009/07/03 : I announced this to the Mantis-dev list hoping there will be some feedback.
We want to be able to extend bts-link (or -like services) so that bugs linked between different bugtrackers can be linked to each-other and the status changes monitored, as part of our tasks in Helios (see LinkedBugsMonitoring).
We’ll probably try and work, until July, on connecting to Mantis as the “distribution/downstream” bugtracker instead of debbugs, and see what architectural changes would be required to test that for the Helios platform specific needs.
I’d like to be able to have a working prototype for July, which would also demonstrate the LinkedData and Semantic Web approach to navigating the bugs of the open source ecosystem, so that we can discuss it at the Debconf. I’ve filed a proposal for a paper at DebConf for this purpose : towards more semantic web into Debian servers (UDD and likes) (see previous post on that matter also).
I suppose that our Mandriva colleagues will be able to move on on bugzilla for SWIM/Mephisto so that we can quickly have very interesting prototypes.
I miss time to describe all that in more details (and will appreciate the coming holidays week ).
Comments welcome, of course.
bts-link is a very useful tool which helps keep track of bug status changes when a Debian bug has been marked as linked to another bug in an other (upstream) bugtracker.
I’ve prepared some slides of introduction for our partners in Helios to introduce them to that tool :
These slides can also be found on the helios site (ODP source).
Also, I’ve started contributing to bts-link in the frame of our work on Helios, and I’m glad my contributions have been integrated, although learning git in the way was kind of a pain
More details about bts-link at : http://bts-link.alioth.debian.org/
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