I have to say I'm still a bit naive to the open source community but I would expect this task to be trivial one and so far it has not.

I simply what to know the bug list for a particular release of open source software (not necessarily the latest version). I'm running into newsgroups that list some of these bugs but I'm surpised there is not a single document listing the outstanding issues for a particular release.

I have a miriad of programs in which I need to do this for, for example:
bash
diff
fileutils
grep
etc...

Should I just attempt to contact the bug list manager (e.g. bug-sh-util@gnu.org)?

I feel I'm missing something here.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike