Being able to track upstream bugs is (IMHO) one of the best features of Launchpad from Inkscape's perspective. Let's take a look at how this works:

First, we find a bug that is really an upstream issue. Here we go:

Main window disabled if a modal dialog sinks https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/168301

This is related to the infamous "dialogs not on top with Win32" problem that we know stems from Gtk, but with an unfortunate twist - if the application is minimized and you right click "close", you never see the dialog, but since the dialog is modal, you can't restore it! Feh Win32!

Actually, it's a Gtk problem. So next we go to the gtk bug tracker.

From gtk.org I clicked on "Bug tracker", then went to

bugzilla.gnome.org. I find the search box and enter "windows dialogs". Browsing through the list I spot this one:

Bug 169965 -- transient dialogs with minimized parent http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=169965

[Note, all gtk bugs are also imported into Launchpad at https://bugs.launchpad.net/gtk/, which would probably be easier to search...]

Reading the bug, it looks like this describes our issue. Unfortunately, the bug hasn't received much activity over the past year (we'll address this in a bit), but at least it's known...

Now go back to our Launchpad bug:

* Look at "Also affects: +Project... +Distribution/Package..." * Click on "+Project" * Type in "gtk" and hit Continue * For the URL, cut and paste the bugzilla.gnome.org bug URL there * Click "Add to Bug Report"

Now our bug report shows the link to the upstream bug. Periodically (once a day I think), Launchpad will spider bugzilla.gnome.org and grab any status changes to the upstream bug report and notify us if the status changes. So in the future when people look at this bug, they'll be able to immediately see if/when it's fixed upstream.

We're not done yet though! Let's be good citizens and let upstream know we also experience this problem. I log into my bugzilla.gnome.org account, and add a comment to the above bug:

"I think we're also experiencing this bug with Inkscape on Windows. A user reports...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/168301 [Pasted copy of original report from our end]

Has anyone had a chance to look into this?"

This will both ping upstream about the issue (hopefully raising its importance, maybe triggering them to update the bug report if it's already fixed, or a dupe), and give the extra info to help debug it.

If we had failed to find a matching bug upstream, we should report a new one. If you're unsure, it's sometimes better to report a new one and let them dupe, than to incorrectly attach our bug to a wrong report, but use best judgement there.

Now go to https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/ and look for the link "0 bugs fixed elsewhere". When our upstream bug gets fixed, this link will change to "1 bug fixed elsewhere", which will let us see the bugs fixed by our upstreams. :-)

Notice the URL for this search says "...=resolved_upstream". If we change this to "open_upstream", we can see the bug we just linked:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bugs?field.status_upstream=open_upstrea...

Some Homework: In my gtk bugzilla searches, I ran across a couple related bugs, which sound similar to other issues we have in Inkscape. See if you can find our matching reports, and link them up:

Bug 164537 -- Non-modal transient dialogs should iconify with parent http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164537

Bug 171456 -- "Keep Above" option in Gimp broken on Win32 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171456

Bryce