If the Debian maintainer is going through the trouble of trying to close the Launchpad bug in the changelog, I think we should probably close it for them. Yes, this is currently not how it works, but I think that's actually a bug. It also currently prevents the changes done to the Debian package between the base version and the new version from showing up on *-changes where Ubuntu does a new upstream before Debian and Debian subsequently makes changes while it has the previous version.
If the Debian maintainer is going through the trouble of trying to close the Launchpad bug in the changelog, I think we should probably close it for them. Yes, this is currently not how it works, but I think that's actually a bug. It also currently prevents the changes done to the Debian package between the base version and the new version from showing up on *-changes where Ubuntu does a new upstream before Debian and Debian subsequently makes changes while it has the previous version.