I think Larry's "split news" and "merge news" ideas are still useful as a bridging mechanism to help us get from the status quo to a tracker based solution.

It would just mean that, at some point in the future, the commit hook would change to be a post-commit hook that pushed to the issue tracker, rather than a pre-commit hook writing to a file in the source repo, and "merge news" would start pulling from the tracker, rather than from the source repo.