Ask HN: issue tracking for open source project? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: issue tracking for open source project?

2 pointsepall6 comments

I'm working on an open source project that happens to be moving its hosting over the next couple of weeks, and we're looking at ditching our current issue tracking system, Trac. Some of the members have expressed concern about switching to a hosted solution like Lighthouse or Assembla, but the less we depend on one person's personal hosting, the better for maintenance. What bug tracking systems do you use? What would you recommend? We need something that is easy for non-developers to submit to, and GitHub/git integration is important to us. We'd like something that is user-hosted (like Trac or Redmine), but a sufficiently awesome hosted tool might fly.

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Github + Lighthouse works pretty seamlessly for us. I wouldn't go back to self-hosted system. Why are the team members concerned? Lighthouse+github really beats the pants off of Trac IMHO.

If you want to keep it private only, I love Eventum from Mysql (found at http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page).

However, for just a good solid bug tracker, you can't beat Mantis in my opinion.

Not sure how it integrates with GitHub, they use git to manage the code, and the latest version of Mantis has the ability to have plugins, so you could always write a plugin for git.

I've come to the conclusion that a mailing list is the correct bug tracker, together with a file in the repository. The cool part is that unless people make an effort themselves, their "problems" are not likely to influence development.

By the way: This is not a joke. Think a bit about it and you will see that it is a possible alternative.

I guess I'm surprised to hear anyone moving away from Trac (I've moved projects toward it), and am curious as to why.

But for open-source projects I've relied on SourceForge, which certainly has a reasonable issue tracking system; and apparently it allows plug-ins for at least Bugzilla.

Mostly it's the administration. Somebody was hosting Trac on her Joyent shared account and didn't want to go through the hassle of moving it, much less continuing to maintain it. Plus we had no GitHub integration. Of course, that's a pretty easy fix, but somebody's gotta actually go and upgrade it.

I have been very pleased with Mantis.

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