Bug #1

[ewx]

Since chiarkwiki is now dead, I need something to replace the DisOrder wishlist page. It's now an HTML page that only I can edit, but what I really want is a bug tracking system, both for wishlist items and real bugs.

I'd like to not run a whole BTS just for one project, so one of the development hosting services seems like the obvious answer. The ones I know of are:

• Sourceforge
• Savannah
• Launchpad
• Alioth

Right now I'd only be interested in bug tracking and closely related facilities, rather than somewhere to host source code or whatever. It's not completely impossible that other facilities might be useful in the future though.

So does anyone have either any suggestions beyond the above, or relevant experience of using them either as a developer or for the matter just as a user wanting to report a bug - which one would you choose and on what grounds?

Comments

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

We use Trac a fair bit internally at NASA. It basically gives you Wiki style documentation, bug tracking and a Subversion front-end, and is pretty easy to use.

Now that I think about it, I should set one up for myself on my own server...

[ewx.livejournal.com]

"I'd like to not run a whole BTS just for one project"

[imc.livejournal.com]

Clearly the solution to that is to start another project.

(What's the 0x81 on line 65 of wishlist.html?)

[emperor]

Put it in Debian then use their BTS?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

A mistake.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I'm not a Debian developer. Someone who is would be welcome to put it in Debian, of course. (Not that I like the Debian BTS much.)

[daniel silverstone (from livejournal.com)]

Sourceforge is inflexible, slow and nasty. Savannah I have no experience of but would assume similar issues with. Alioth the same.

Launchpad is very proprietary, requires logins and lots of data to be entrusted to Canonical, but does seem to work.

There exists a BTS type system called 'cvstrac' which is packaged, simple and lightweight. I realise that suggesting this contravenes your requirement not to run a BTS for a single project, but CVSTrac might be the solution to sway you. Despite its name, CVSTrac supposedly supports CVS SVN and GIT.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

They all require logins, which seems reasonable, and in any case isn't a further barrier in any cases since I either already had one or created one while exploring the options.

The only data I'd be trusting to anyone in the first instance would be a bug list, and the whole point is to entrust the bug list to someone else. I suppose I could scrape out the contents from time to time anyway.

All of the ones that weren't Sourceforge seemed fairly quick, at least in comparison. Launchpad's code browser crawled rather, but that's not the bit I'm most interested in (although if I was the bzr support would be point in favor).

I've had one "avoid Launchpad" in another forum but they didn't give any details as to why.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

For the long-term record, the answer appears to be that nobody cares enough to actually do anything putting DisOrder into Debian.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I seem to be in a minority of one, but I find trac utterly horrible to use.

In particular, the bug tracker seems awful.