Comment 6 for bug 642418

Reed panicked a bit seeing the branch I attached, so let me clarify.

There's actually two problems. The first is what this bug report was originally filed about - that checkwatches updates bugs that are dupes upstream. That's a straightforward problem to fix since we track the status and know that it's a dupe already at the point we update it.

But Reed updated the bug to focus on a more fundamental issue - that Launchpad does not automatically update bug watches when the upstream bug becomes a dupe. Presumably, if it did, it wouldn't even be trying to update the bugs to begin with. However, this is not a straightforward thing to fix, because we do not track the upstream duplicate bug number in the BugWatch table, or anywhere easy for checkwatches to find.

Anyway, the first is easy to fix and solves the original complaint so I did that. The other is going to require more thinking to figure out. I've emailed gmb to gain his wisdom, so we'll see. The trick is probably going to be whether Bugzilla gives us this info cheaply enough.