[jaggederest]

I wish the bugs were tracked in Git.

a more-or-less simple text file with the bug and various metadata could make use of the distributed nature of Git.

Submit all bugs as pull requests to subsidiary repositories, important ones get merged upstream (along with their fixes, preferably)

An example of this sort of 'subsidiary repo for special purposes which is merged to upstream' is the docrails repository:

https://github.com/lifo/docrails

This does require the subsidiary repository to have more liberal commit access (probably 'all users of project with a github account'), but hey, it's subsidiary.