can't report link to bugs in projects none of which use launchpad for bug tracking

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

Here's what I wrote on my blog today:

------- begin excerpt from Zooko's blog

A guy in a coffeeshop (Atlas Purveyors in Boulder, Colorado, USA) asked me about my Launchpad t-shirt yesterday. I told him that what I liked about it is that I can tie together tickets in issue trackers from different open source projects.

Because I spend a lot of effort on packaging and deployment issues, I am often faced with bugs that interact with multiple open source projects. If I open an issue ticket with one of them, they often close it saying it is the other project's fault. So what I like to do is open issue tickets with all of them, and open an issue ticket on launchpad which is linked to the tickets on all the others, and give everyone a link to the launchpad ticket.

This has worked in the past to let me keep track of the status of the bugs in various projects, as well as to help members of those projects efficiently come up to speed on how the issue interacts with other projects.

e.g.:

* https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/binutils/+bug/461303
* https://bugs.launchpad.net/tahoe-lafs/+bug/821000

However, today I'm stymied because of the five open source projects involved in the bug I'm looking at -- Fedora, GCC, Crypto++, pycryptopp, and Tahoe-LAFS -- none of them use Launchpad as their primary issue tracker. Therefore I can't figure out how to open a ticket on launchpad which I can then link to the respective project-specific tickets.

Maybe this means launchpad isn't intended for this use and I should stop trying.

Not sure what I'll tell the next person who asks about my Launchpad t-shirt in a coffeeshop.

UPDATE:

Update: Robert Collins suggested I create the ticket on launchpad by reporting a bug against Ubuntu's packaging of the software, even though technically speaking the version that Ubuntu has packaged doesn't have this problem. Here's the result:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/pycryptopp/+bug/915018

However, since other people are not likely to stumble upon this solution, I'm still not entirely sure what I should tell the next person who asks me about my launchpad t-shirt.
------- end excerpt from Zooko's blog

By the way, this ticket seems intimately related to https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/33642 somehow...

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (zooko)]

P.S. Heh heh heh. The comments on https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=773443 are a good example of this. :-) "Why are you filing it against gcc? It is completely intentional. Just fix your package(s).". Of course I probably filed the bug all wrong, so I wouldn't blame Jakub if he were annoyed. But also, RedHat bugzilla and/or the practices and culture around it aren't currently all that useful for the purpose of tracking things that aren't exactly bugs in software, such as incompatibilities between versions of different packages of software.