Probably too late to make any difference, but
another possibility occurred to me.

Rather than using:


  curl -fsIo/dev/null http://bugs.example.net/status$N

how about creating a template that is empty. Touch
tracker/html/issue.empty.html then use:

 curl -fsIo/dev/null 
'http://localhost:9017/demo/issue10400?@template=empty'; echo $?
22

curl -fsIo/dev/null 
'http://localhost:9017/demo/issue1?@template=empty'; echo $?
0

where issue1 exists and the other one doesn't.

This is probably as close as you can get at the moment. It does go into
the template code, but does very little work.

Alternatively you could use the xmlrpc interface.