Able to report bugs against projects that use external issue tracking systems without a valid bug number

The person who knows that a bug needs to be fixed upstream does not necessarily have time to report the bug upstream (or to check whether it has been already). So instead of requiring those two things to be done at the same time, Launchpad could do a better job of advertising bug reports that have been marked as upstream but not yet linked.

One way of doing this would be an "N bugs need reporting upstream" link on project, distribution, and package Bugs pages, leading to canned search results.

Another way would be to highlight the need on the bug report page itself, one example of a general "here's what this bug report needs now" hint.

I wonder what percentage of users really know if their bug is an upstream bug or not. I get the impression that some reporters just click on all available buttons which is why there are so many bugs that get marked as security issues or nominated for all Ubuntu releases. These false links just take time of a triager who will look at the bug in the future.

What is the use case for marking something as affecting upstream but not providing a link?

I gave the use case in my first sentence: "The person who knows that a bug needs to be fixed upstream does not necessarily have time to report the bug upstream (or to check whether it has been already)."

OK, then I suggest this feature is not useful in it's present form:

There is no evidence attached to show the bug really does affect upstream, e.g. the version that it occurs in. It is unlikely that someone had gone to the effort of downloading, building and testing an upstream version and yet not done the final step of filing the bug report. (Filing a report upstream only requires having an existing bug login, being familiar with the upstream bug tracker and copying some content from the LP bug. These steps are arguably easier than the download/build/test steps).

My experience with bugs marked as affecting upstream without bug numbers is there is no evidence that they really have been tested with an upstream version. At a glance the bug report looks like it has been sent upstream when it hasn't.

If the requirement is to have someone else send the bug upstream then there could be a "bug-upstream" group to subscribe bugs to. This is not a great solution as the person who tested the bug is the best person to respond to questions from upstream.

In reality most bugs should be marked upstream - any bug that is triaged and does not have an upstream bug link needs one opened. (Doing an advanced search for "Show bugs that need to be forwarded to an upstream bug tracker" for confimed/triaged bugs shows this currently). If any additional user input was required it would be a "this bug only affects Ubuntu" button.

With X.org bug triage I frequently fit the use case mpt describes in comment #3, and do find it useful to have a way to distinguish bugs that need forwarding from those that don't, however in practice I've found that doing this flagging via "Also affects project" without an external link doesn't really work well. See my comment on bug #333215.

Bug #333215 seems to be this same issue - the feature is not useful as implemented and can cause confusion. Both this bug and that one seem to indicate it should be made not possible to create an external bug watch against a non-Launchpad project without providing a link.

The explanations were confusing, but now I've looked closely I'm pretty sure this is a dupe of 333215 - marking it as so