Bug tracker evaluation

The currently used bug-tracker, Mantis, is not the favorite software of everybody. We're therefore looking into replacing it.

Wishlist

It'd be great if a bug tracker could provide the following features:

• Git integration: Automatically add notes to a bug when a commit message contains some sort of magic keyword. Possibly something like "(solves: #12345)" which would then set the status of bug 12345 to "fixed" and later (when an appropriate tag has been pushed) to "closed".
• Email integration: Send a copy of new bugs to the mailing list and make it possible to answer using email.
• Ease of maintenance: I hate taking care of web applications. Keeping the software up to date should therefore be as simple as possible, preferably by being installed from a Debian package.

Candidates

Redmine

• → See: http://www.redmine.org/

Pro

• Nice and polished web interface.
• Debian package available and up to date.
• Git integration from upstream.
• Email integration from upstream.
• Under active development and supported (several patch releases for the stable version).

Contra

• Complex to set up (Ruby-on-Rails).
• Way more functionality than we need (wiki, forum, ...).

Discussion

Have all wanted features. I recommend using trunk, it is quote stable (I run it with 50 users) and have a lot more feature than latest 0.8 release. Trunk will be released as 0.9 soon. Deploying Redmine is as easy as deploying a rails application, the easiest way is using Passenger (aka mod_rails). --Renchap 16:58, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

• From a first quick glance it looks nice. Git and email support are available from upstream. The version available in Debian is 0.9.0~svn2907-1~bpo50+1. I'm a bit shy about the whole Ruby-on-Rails thing, though: I don't really want to setup an web-application framework just for a simple bug tracker (that's hardly been used in the past). --octo 09:43, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Bugzilla

• → See: http://www.bugzilla.org/

Pro

• Integrated email capabilities http://www.bugzilla.org/features/#email-in
• Bugzille Reports MediaWiki integration: This might actually be quite cool on the roadmap page and similar. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Bugzilla_Reports
• BugSquish MediaWiki integration: Strikes through links to closed bugs. Not very useful, but a nice touch. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BugSquish
• Written in Perl, can work with mod_perl.

Contra

• Git integration not available from upstream (or at all, as far as I can see)
• A simple list of open bugs is almost impossible to find.

GNATS

• → See: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnats/

Pro

• Client/server architecture. Web interface one of multiple frontends.

Contra

• Not in active development. Last version is from 2005.
• Data kept in (binary?) database files in the file system.
• No Git integration from upstream.
• GNATS' own bug tracker is broken.