

Ask HN: Best light-weight bug tracking tool, more robust than TRAC? - betashop

Looking for the best light-weight bug tracking tool, more robust than TRAC?
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thirsteh
Redmine is awesome: <http://www.redmine.org/>

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olsonjeffery
+1 for Redmine. The windows story is a lot better, too (Apache on windows =
suck). Multi-project/repo out of the box with no kludgey plugins. Custom
workflow is configurable through the web interface vs. text config.. in fact,
MUCH more of Redmine's config is exposed via the web interface vs text files
(pretty much source control binaries, email and database provider/location is
the only stuff you need to configure via config file ootb).

Really, Redmine is _very_ similar, in my opinion to Trac. But I think it
benefits from hindsight and doesn't carry any of the historical implementation
limitations/baggage of Trac.

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thijsc
We use Pivotal Tracker to manage all our development projects. It's not only a
bugtracker, but extremely usefull if you have any kind of agile process.

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acgourley
For low volume projects it could be a good bug tracker, too. And for those
that don't know, its web based and they will host it for you for free.

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FraaJad
Fossil SCM: <http://fossil-scm.org/>

Fossil is a DVCS + Wiki + Bug tracking, though you can choose not to use the
DVCS part..

* Light-weight? yes. it's just a single executable <1MB

* Robust? maybe. Projects using Fossil: SQLite, Mongrel2 etc.

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nuriaion
We use Lighthouse <http://lighthouseapp.com/> We needed a simple tool which
can also be used by people who have minimal computer knowledge...

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mjwalto2
Another vote for Lighthouse - we use it and love it at Off & Away. Powerful
w/out the bloat.

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JunkDNA
I absolutely love Fogbugz. I find Jira to be a bloated, complex mess. I've
also used Trac and Bugzilla, both were clunky and lacking in creature
comforts.

~~~
anateus
Very much agreed. Fogbugz also has one of the simplest "surface" interfaces.
It manages to hide all the complexity, without sacrificing feature, leading to
very smooth workflows. Trac, Bugzilla, and JIRA (I haven't used Redmine) all
seem to lead a sort of "fragmented" style of use, where you transition between
thought modalities, while Fogbugz keeps it very streamlined.

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agranig
Mantis <http://www.mantisbt.org/> works very well for us. Easy to use and to
customize.

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st3fan
I am going to suggest JIRA. I think it is pretty lightweight. You can either
run it with the built-in database or let it talk to MySQL or PostgreSQL. It
runs without the use of an app server. Just unzip and run.

<http://atlassian.com/starter/>

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jlintz
no offense, but JIRA is not in the slightest lightweight. JIRA is extremely
abstracted out to be whatever you want it to be. It's good for project
management and for different projects that require different work flows, but
you definitely need to spend time in setting it up to fit your needs.

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jokull
GitHub has just enough issue tracking tools for my needs.

~~~
aeontech
280North built a pretty amazing front-end to the GH Issues using Github API
and Cappucino - check out <http://githubissues.heroku.com/>

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wnoise
Other than text files, I've only used bugzilla, which is decidedly not "light-
weight". How does trac fail to be "robust"? I've not seen any complaints about
it scribbling all over its database.

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abalashov
We are huge fans of Mantis (www.mantisbt.org). It strikes me as lightweight
compared to many solutions advertised here, and has the virtue of being
agnostic between PostgreSQL and MySQL. It's also completely free.

We integrated it extensively with Subversion a few years ago, and there
already exist pre-built Git integration modules for it. The plugin ecosystem
has come a long way.

One important criteria to me personally was the suitability of it for use as a
project management and/or feature roadmapping system, not just an actual _bug_
tracker per se, explicitly for bugs in the sense of defects. Mantis performs
extremely well on this count as well.

Probably the biggest high-profile use of Mantis I know is Digium's issue
tracker for Asterisk: <http://issues.asterisk.org/> \-- you can see it in
action there. Their particular use of it relies on Mantis's extensive ACL
features (optional--you don't have to get that complicated if you don't want
to!) to open the process of enrollment and bug submission to the public at
large, to allow certain people intermediate levels of access (e.g. QA
testers), and to impose an actual hierarchy of developers, managers and bug
marshals inside the company.

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siddhant
I'd also recommend Pivotal Tracker. Its simple, neat, and gets the work done.

~~~
benmccann
I hate Pivotal Tracker. I've been forced to use it on a few projects and found
it way too hard to use. E.g. it never shows what you're working on by default
and you have to open up a special window for it. And you can't just mark
something as done - you have to move it through a whole set of crazy states
like accepted and delivered. I'd much rather use any other bug tracker or
something simple like a spreadsheet.

~~~
aeontech
I'm not sure how you were using it, but Pivotal was one of the easiest task
trackers I've used (used it for all planning and dev work for six months at a
previous job). The tasks you're working on just show up in a separate column,
and as for moving through states, I don't see how clicking a button to
deliver/accept is crazy - you don't even have to reload the page like you do
in Trac when you mark a bug as complete.

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vidushi
I would like to suggest www.groupsense.com it is a bug tracking tool with
social features. So you can follow bugs / people / projects.

So for e.g. You can follow a particular bug that you are interested in. Or you
may follow a particular user who might have filled interesting bugs in the
past.

You get an activity stream from the bugs/people/projects that you are
following.

I am one of the co-founders so take it with a grain of salt.

I would be happy to hand hold you to implement this and add features if you
need them.

Send me an email at vidushi@groupsense.com I promise you it is a new software
but we have been using it internally for over a year it is stable and you will
love it when in 15 seconds everyday you will be able to look at your activity
stream and exactly know what is happening.

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grandalf
I like retrospectiva:

<http://retrospectiva.org/overview>

~~~
dabeeeenster
Looks nice. Can you create tickets by email?

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cantastoria
We love Sifter...

www.sifterapp.com

It's beautifully done, the only drawback is that you can't send it e-mail.

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betashop
Anyone have experience with fogbugz?

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olsonjeffery
This SO question does a pretty good job of running down my opinions on Fogbugz
(used it once at a former client, wasn't really overwhelmed).

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14293/are-there-any-
unhap...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14293/are-there-any-unhappy-
users-of-fogbugz)

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meeech
Not sure what you mean by more 'robust' than trac.

that said, we use redmine at work.

saw this the other day <http://16bugs.com/> which looked like it might be
interesting.

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damoncali
Shameless plug- my own app, <http://trackjumper.com> is aimed at small teams
with simple needs. No extra features and everything is unlimited.

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nl
JIRA.

It's the best bug tracker around. The only downside is that it is so
configurable people will start using it or non-bug tracking things, which
doesn't work well

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bkrausz
Anything that ties into GitHub well? We just switched from SVN+Trac to GitHub.
Considering still using Trac but wondering if any good alternatives exist.

~~~
tommorris
If you want something more lightweight than Trac, why not just use the Issues
feature in GitHub.

It seems to me the choices are:

1\. ditz (command-line based version tracker that keeps data in your version
control repo - plays well with DVCSes like Git/Mercurial)

2\. whatever comes by default with your repo hosting (Github or BitBucket or
Google Code for open source SVN)

3\. hosted Trac, Redmine or Bugzilla

For client work, I'm using Redmine, although I'm thinking of switching to ditz
(or something similar) to make my life simpler.

For personal projects, I either use TODO.txt or the repo-provided bug tracker.

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jashmenn
ditz: <http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/148367>

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kdeldycke
Slightly off-topic, but if what annoy you in Trac is its setup or management,
let me introduce pbp.recipe.trac (
<http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pbp.recipe.trac> ), a buildout recipe which can
help you automate deployment and administration of several Trac instances.

And sorry to Hacker News community for this shameless self-promotion.

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nishith
On demand (in the cloud) option is IMO nicer for startup teams.

