Ask Slashdot: How Do You Track Bugs For Personal Software Projects? 221
An anonymous reader writes "One of my personal software projects grows bigger than I thought and the bugs becomes too many to just remember. I looked around for an open source bugs tracking system but found no ideal solutions. Ideally I wanted a simple system that does not need server setup and extra database setup, and can run under Mac OS X. Another option is a cloud service if it's affordable enough. Any suggestions from Slashdot?"
Mantis (Score:5, Informative)
Been using Mantis for years, easy to install, easy to setup, easy to manage.
Lighthouse (Score:5, Informative)
Use unfuddle.com (Score:5, Informative)
I am not associated with them, nor employed by them. But I've used them for many projects now and been generally happy with the result.
JIRA (Score:3, Informative)
Redmine (Score:5, Informative)
When I need to set up a self-hosted project and bug tracker, I normally use Redmine, which is very easy to use. It's written with Ruby on Rails, and so should be relatively easy to get a local SQLite-backed copy running on Mac OS using Rails' built-in mini web server.
This post is overly complicated but some of its information may be useful:
http://www.redmine.org/boards/2/topics/2768 [redmine.org]
Fossil is the way to go. (Score:5, Informative)
Fossil (http://www.fossil-scm.org) is just great: it allows you to manage your code, documentation (wiki) and tickets (bugs).
It's really small and lightweight, offers its own web interface and can be made to run on a central server with a CGI script. Oh, and it's free and open-source.
It also scales very well: for instance the entire NetBSD code base has fossil repositories.
I am currently re-starting some personal projects and I will be using fossil almost exclusively for these. It's simply fantastic.
Fog Bugz (Score:3, Informative)
Fix them (Score:1, Informative)
Re:highlighted comments in source (Score:3, Informative)
This isn't true at all.
What happens when you have more bugs than you have time to fix? How do you choose which to work on first? How do you remember which ones lead to data loss, and which ones have a workaround? How do you remember how to reproduce each bug? How do you manage patches? How do you remember which patches are compatible with other patches? How do you track the number of reported occurrences of a bug so you can prioritize your fixes more intelligently?
These things may be pointless in a small project where you can remember all that stuff, but just because it's a one-person project does not mean that it's not too big to get lost in.
Re:Fix them (Score:4, Informative)
SVN (Score:2, Informative)
TortoiseSVN is easy enough to setup to run without a server locally and works great.
Turnkey Redmine (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mantis (Score:4, Informative)
Re:JIRA (Score:0, Informative)
I'd avoid Atlassian. When I asked them for screenshots to show to my boss, they called me a "stupid petulent(sic) child." They then went on a rant about how much better San Francisco is than Seattle(my domain name has seattle in it). Other than my experience with calling Microsoft about a volume license, they were the most unprofessional company I have ever dealt with.
org-mode in emacs (Score:4, Informative)