Git integration to bugtracking: can it track merges?

Question

I'm looking at the various bugtracking(bt) systems that have git backends, and they all seem to rely on adding a bt-specific tag to the commit message, as a way to determine which bug to map the commit to.

Given that git retains the commit history when merges/pulls/cherry-picks are done, all of those commits (that might come from outside parties such as upstream) will not have any bt-specific tag in them, and thus will not show up in the bugtracking system. Which in my view seems to make it useless for any git project other than ones fully developed by the same person/team/organization (which would then always add the bt-specific tag to the commit messages).

Am I missing something here? Is there a way that these git-to-bt integrations work that can also capture outside commits coming in through merges? I've looked through the descriptions of various bugtracking systems (redmine, trac, jira, etc...) and I can't find any documentation that would indicate how they work with this (they usually have single commit examples in the docs only).

Answer 1

The only thing I can think of is that you can merge in the upstream branch, but tell git not to commit the merge results with --no-commit and then git commit to add your bug-tracker reference. Otherwise I don't know how a bug tracker can be smart enough to know how to map bug numbers to commit IDs.