I work on a team of 70 developers (directly) and another 50 or so work on a shared code base between our project and others, and I make daily modifications to that shared code. all those developers are spread from PST to CET+1. Bugs that get fixed are sometimes done by domain knowledge holders on he base team, and those fixes are large fixes that get done on a different release schedule to mine. Its an utter waste of time for me to bug some guy in Seattle about something that he fixed months ago in a release that I haven't received yet when I can see the fix version and change in jira, and either wait or take the fix from the upcoming release myself.
It really depends on the situation. If you have a small team that owns their own codebase, then people will generally know what's going on. In a large codebase with multiple branches it's going to be messier. If everyone's sharing a bug tracker it should be easy enough to claim bugs you're working on.
