Searching for a good BTS

I have always been searching, and still am, for the perfect way to keep all my notes about projects i'm working on. Especially, to keep the todo's and bugs. I have tried different system: going from pieces of paper to systems like dotProject, but none of them completely suited my needs. dotProject needs to many clicks and pieces of paper can get lost.

Since about half a year now i use my wiki for this purpose (amongst other uses). But yesterday i got the idea to try some Bug Tracking Systems. Although these BTS's are generally specifically designed to manage bugs (duh!) they can also be used to manage todo's etc. That's by example how mozilla uses bugzilla, then not only keep their bugs in it, but also complete discussions about their website and marketing etc.

So i started searching for some good BTS's, since i think bugzilla is a bit difficult. I wanted something that looks nice, has support for multiple projects and doesn't scare normal computer users when they add a ticket.

At usefulinc i found a list of bugtrackers, so i started exploring and found 4 BTS's of which i liked the screenshots/features/demo's:

  • Eventum: is a GPL'ed Issue/bug tracking system and is used by the MySQL AB Technical Support. I installed it on my server at http://dev.budts.be/eventum/ to play with it. It looks nice, but has sometimes some strange behaviors imho, by example: if you make somebody a 'reporter' they don't see the link to the report form, although they can add a report if they enter the url in their browser.. What it also misses (or i didn't find it) is the possibility to make some projects publicily accessible, users always have to login before they can see a buglist.
  • FlySpray: Was developed for Psi. I looks quite nice, and is less difficult then eventum, but it misses some features. Also all project are accessible to the public, but can't be made private or limited to some users. See it at http://dev.budts.be/flyspray/
  • IssueTracker: I haven't tried this BTS yet, but now that i look at the demo and compare it to Eventum and Flyspray it looks rather limited to me.
  • Trac: This BTS looks really, really very nice. It is a combinations between a BTS and a Wiki, and also has support for SVN. I'd really love to try this system, but the problem is that it's written in Python and uses SQLite as its databases and needs some other apps/libs like SVN to be installed on the server. Since i'm on a shared server i don't know if these libs are installed and if i can use them... maybe i should try it first on my localhost...

Comments

Avatar

Monica on 2004-11-11 04:12 reply

I'm looking into BTS apps too

I'm looking into BTS apps too so this was helpful! I downloaded Bugzilla but the installation looked like a nightmare so I didn't even try it. Eventum got up and running pretty easily but there is about 2kb of help files and no online support that I can find. It's going to work but I can't figure out how to close an issue (though I can work with the issue resolution categories...). Did you get that far into it?

Great site!

Avatar

TeRanEX on 2004-11-11 12:15 reply

The lack of help files is

The lack of help files is indeed a bad thing. Closing an issue can be done by clicking on the issue (from inside the issue list), so that you see the details. There you will find a button 'close issue' on the right (after the issue description).

thx!

Avatar

Roel on 2004-11-28 19:49 reply

There using Trac on TextDrive

There using Trac on TextDrive for TxP and some other OSS projects. It seems to be working very well, although it has been hit bad by wiki spammers at least once.

I'm actually hosted on their $5 plan, so I can enjoy the goodies. But that plan was phased out recently....

Avatar

jobst on 2005-05-10 11:03 reply

can you make a eventum

can you make a eventum testpage publically accessible
that woud be very good thanks in advance

jobst

Avatar

TeRanEX- on 2005-05-10 11:22 reply

@jobst: Sorry i don't have it

@jobst: Sorry i don't have it installed anymore...

Comment Atom Feed