Bug/feature tracking system?

[impishfae]

You've got a bunch of projects that are all active and being supported. Just wondering if you'd thought about setting up a bug tracking/feature tracking system for them, to keep track of what issues are against which project in which version, and when they're being fixed/worked on.

It's possible you're running something like that internally anyway and those of us out here in .net land just can't see it, but I'm amazed you can keep track of what goes where. (Even allowing for your todo lists and changelogs!)

[Lokorin]

My current high-tech tracking system is comprised of a notebook next to the keyboard

I have thought about it, but I'm unsure which tracker that would suit the project best. I would say that a standard ticket based tracking system along with some subversion integration would be good, so from looking at Wikipedias comparisons that would leave

[impishfae]

Love those hi-tech tracking systems. Particularly, for instance, when you spill your beverage-of-choice, say, over your notes. Just, y'know, selecting an example at random. And then your notes are mostly a blur of scribbles on some stained paper. *cough* Not that this has ever happened to me. Nope. Nosirree. Not me. Never.

I've used Bugzilla extensively (most of my perl hacking experience comes from tweaking it to do strange and bizarre activities). I've probably used it too much and am a bit blind to its faults.

I've never used Trac.

So... I'm not too good at providing a good unbiased comparison! (Come to think of it, I've pretty much only ever used Bugzilla as a fault/feature tracking system for proper development)

Why don't you install both and try setting them both up with some of our bug threads from the forums and see which one you like more?

[Lokorin]

Sounds like a good idea. The server containing the subversion repository and site placeholder will probably be coming down for hardware upgrades today (and might be down for half a day, I know it's a bit of a short notice), once that is done I will install both systems on it.

[impishfae]

Shiny new hardware and software toys! Good luck.

[Lokorin]

Trac seemed a bit too lightweight at the moment, but I will keep an eye on it. In the mean time I have installed bugzilla at http://dkplp.org/bugzilla/ . I will play around with the configuration etc tomorrow.

I already have a question though. It seems that e-mail addresses are used all over the place as identifiers, which must result in some amount of spam. Is there any easy way/mod to change that?

[impishfae]

Hmmm. You can set what the regex is for a username.

The default is to use email addresses so that the system (when it's properly configured into your mail server) can send out email notifications when a bug that you have raised or been assigned, is modified.

Users an also set (on a per-user basis) whether they want to receive emails or not.

I can't remember if there's an anti-robot-email-sniffer-spammer option to obfuscate emails or not.

If you don't want any emails at all, then ensure you appropriately 'misconfigure' the connection to the mailserver and set the regex to allow usernames that don't necessarily contain the <word>@<word>.<word> format. You will then have to manually pre-set the password on new accounts and tell people via some other means (normally they get an initial random password emailed to them)

[Lokorin]

Tack+ might also be worth having a look at.

[impishfae]

There's a few around... Depends what back-end language and database you want, as well as feature-set.

I remember looking at Double Choco Latte a few years ago. It didn't have what I wanted at the time, but it might have moved on.

Or if you want to drink the tigris koolaid, there's Scarab (again, evaluated two years ago and fell a bit short, but will have almost certainly moved on since then since the svn community is highly active these days).

Assorted lists:
dmoz

[Lokorin]

Scarab does look nice on the surface. It's a big plus that it's made with the intent to be easily integrated, I can see myself wanting to hook this kind of system into many other things

[impishfae]

I'd see one of your high priority feature requirements to be the capacity to use one bug tracking system across multiple projects (without having to have multiple installations).

Particularly since some of your components have interdependencies (eqdkp plugin with dkplp, ferinstance) so having some connectivity would be helpful for tracking release dependencies.

Ahhh... I love a good tool.

[Lokorin]

Just in case someone wonders what's taking so long:

I'm having a hard time getting Java to work properly on the server. The reason for this is that I'm currently testing an experimental Fedora Core release on the server. The plan was (and is) to reinstall it all when the harddrive is changed, but I'm now unsure on how long it will be until I get the new one. So until then I'm going to see if I can get around it somehow.

GCJ works, but scarab doesn't seem to like it. Sun's returns some cryptic message about stack guards and IBM's gives the following (slightly more informative) error message:

[Lokorin]

For an update: Java is now working, Maven is happy, I will see about Scarab tomorrow.

In case anyone is having similar problems: The solution was to build an RPM from Sun's SDK. You will need JPackage, but that is all in the instructions. What is not in the instructions is that I got a couple of dependencies problems when trying to install the built rpms with yum. The dependencies missed were libodbcinst.so and some other file. I already had the .so files, but not the rpm that provided it.

They are part of the unixODBC project. I had to do it in two steps. First I tried to install unixODBC-devel.i386 from a fedora devel repo through yum, but that lacked a dependency on unixODBC itself, so I had to download a fitting rpm from the project page, install it, and then rerun yum. After that it allowed me to install unixODBC-devel.i386 which fixed the last dependencies needed to install the freshly built sun rpms.

I hope it works for others too.

[impishfae]

Criminy. Good stuff. I think I would have given up by now if I were you. Admittedly, linux sysadmin has never been my strong suit. If I can't get away with 'make install' out of the box, then I run away and hide, whimpering.

Here's hoping Scarab is worthy!

[Lokorin]

It's finally up and running: http://dkplp.org/scarab/issue

I keep getting permission denied messages when trying to add issues though, so I probably have some digging left to do. Additionally it does not seem to find any configured smtp, so no user registrations for now. The login "Tester" with password "tester" should have developer access to the DKP Log Parser client module though.