In response to Edd’s Blog entry:

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p>Interoperability between bugzilla systems is quite likely to be achievable. Getting debbugs into the picture is likely to be far more difficult. There are a lot of things that we can already do to help though:

debugzilla
Erich wrote this script to look through debian bug listings and check any reports forwarded to bugzilla. It outputs a listing of all the bugs and the bugzilla status, so you can see when it changes. This is extremely useful when you have many bugs forwarded to bugzilla. Unfortunately debugzilla isn’t working at the moment - bts interface down?
Bugzilla CC
Simple enough, setting the bugzilla CC field to package@packages.qa.debian.org is quite helpful. It would be even better if bugzilla would let us set it to the xxxxxx-submitter@b.d.o.
Encourage users to report upstream
Most of the galeon bugs I get are of little use to Debian - they are feature requests, etc. To reduce my workload (and so increase the real work I do, I have written a /usr/share/bug/galeon/presubj file to ask users to report upstream for most things.
bugwatcher
Have to mention it since it’s my program. Doesn’t help keep track of non-debian things, but it certainly makes to task of setting the forwarded field easier

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p>I think far more important though is getting maintainers to actually forward bug reports. Looking at some of the larger desktop apps, there are often hundreds of open reports with nothing done to them. No amount of extra systems will help with that.

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p>As for XML or something for bug reports, bugzilla already has quite good xml output. Debian bts only has html over http. A more machine readable interface to debbugs would be really useful. See #207225: debbugs: add RFC822 output option.