How do we push patches upstream?

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

I suspect you all agree with me that it is best to push our patches
upstream, to reduce the chance of including bad patches in Debian
(hello OpenSSL).  But how do we do it?  Some earlier patches are
submitted as bug reports upstream, as trac issues, but most of them
are not accepted yet.  This make me suspect a different approach is
needed.  What do the rest of you think is a good way to get patches
included in future versions of the upstream packages?

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen