Bugtracking

With wxVenus, I wanted to set up a public butracker. I wanted to avoid Google Code because of my recent account problems. At a previous company we used FogBUGZ and the developer-focussed bug-entry and editing was brilliant, so I was looking for something similar. I couldn’t find anything I liked immediately and so just to get started I began using Lighthouse which has a very nice, clear and simple user-interface which requires minimal effort to use (*cough*bugzilla*cough*), but it was locked to private-only. If I’d wanted to pay up I could have got anon-view but no anon-submissions IIRC.

At work we use a default install of Trac, which is reasonably horrible, but I know that it’s heavily customisable via a simple config system and plugins so I gave that a go (hence the previous post on mod_python). I obviously got something wrong when I was setting it up though because loading a single page took at least five seconds to appear as well as murdering my server, and it was completely unusable as a bugtracker. I tried running tracd (the standalone trac web server) and it responded much, much more quickly but still not fast enough to use.

In the end I did set up home on Google Code, but I’m not very happy about it. The interface is quite good, although typically for Google, sparse, but there’s no obvious API if I want to get my wiki pages or issues out, and I certainly don’t trust Google not to close my account again, even if by accident, so I’d be much happier hosting my own – tied into bzr ideally.

So is there anything out there that meets my simple, fast and free bugtracking needs? I am not bothered about milestones, priorities, ticket progress trackers or due dates. Just a list of bugs which I can arbitrarily re-order and add comments to will keep me happy.

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8 thoughts on “Bugtracking”

  1. I’m happy that you’re trying out Launchpad. If you have questions or need help, ask on #launchpad on freenode, or contact me and I’ll see what I can do.

    (My job is part of the Launchpad development team.)

  2. if nothing fits your needs and you don’t mind hosting your own tomcat server, we would be happy to give you a free open source version of our soon to release bug tracking product fixx.

  3. BugTracker.NET is a free open source web based bug tracking system with an approach heavily influenced by FogBugz. (I’m the author).

    It is for sure simple, fast, and free.

    It has the same approach as FogBugz with regards to no required fields; comments, attachments displayed in a narrative; a screen capture utility that let’s you turn a screenshot into a bug entry in three clicks…

    The three screenshots at the bottom of the following link show that it’s not only easy to add more fields if you need them, but it’s easy to REMOVE the ones you don’t need:
    http://www.ifdefined.com/doc_bug_tracker_custom_fields.html

    Here’s what other folks have written about it:
    http://www.ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet_others_say.html

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