Notebook (Posts about foss)/categories/foss.atom2019-05-05T21:20:57ZToni MüllerNikolaTrackers - a Rough Overview/posts/trackers_-_a_rough_overview/2011-05-30T20:56:00+02:002011-05-30T20:56:00+02:00Toni Mueller<div><p>I've been asked to compare various issue trackers. While I don't
really feel qualified do to so, I have an opinion nonetheless. So here
are my two cents about it:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>There are trackers for various use cases, various technologies, and
licenses (eg. Jira is imho mostly commercial software).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I've not yet found a package which is equally suitable for handling
customer (self-?) support tasks outside of software development, and
software development tasks.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I don't have real experience with Jira, and only a very cursory
impression about eg. OTRS (Perl) and Mantis (PHP).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>From all trackers I have seen so far, OTRS, RT (Perl) and roundup
(Python) are basically suitable to customer support tasks, but less
suitable to software development tasks.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>OTOH, Trac and Redmine seem to support software development tasks
much better (and Redmine, written with RoR, much better than Trac,
written in Python, imho).</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>For me, so far only Roundup and RT mattered for the customer-support
space, but I intend to take a look at OTRS, now that they claim to
support ITIL-conformant processes (whatever that means, but it's a
requirement of some potential customers). When I talk about RT, I mean
RT 3.x, not RT 4.x. I also ignore all PHP stuff for principal reasons.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Roundup's advantage, compared to RT, is that it is very lightweight.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Roundup's permission system seems to be more flexible than RT's, but
all-in-all, changing anything requires rolling out a new revision of
the installation (eg. to include the new permissions). This stuff is
highly intertwined with the rest of roundup, and I've yet to see
(didn't try) how to eg. migrate the database from one version of the
software to the next.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>RT's advantage is the much larger functionality out of the box, and
esp. support for distributed workflows, with auto-escalation,
re-assignment, hierarchical tickets with dependencies, statistics,
multiple external authentication sources and what-not. It's much
more heavy-weight, though, and the UI is clumsier, too. RT can be
scripted, and the scripts seem to end up in the database, making it
comparatively easy to migrate an instance. It's Perl, though, and
the main author(s) are afaik on the forefront of Perl development
themselves, so you frequently find that you have to pull in
brand-new versions of modules from CPAN that you've never heard of,
and that have had little exposure.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>OOTB, RT's permission system is much more powerful than what is
distributed with Roundup, though.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Roundup seems to be much more geared towards a "one customer
project, one tracker" situation, where eg. general access control is of
not very high importance.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>In the software development space, integrating a tracker, a wiki, and
a repository browser was popularized probably by SourceForge, and has
led to the creation of packages like Trac and Redmine, the latter
allegedly being a clone of Trac (imho it isn't, if you run the two
side-by-side).</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Roundup has no integration with either a wiki or a repository browser
out of the box, so one would have to do manual work to use it in that
manner. One also has to find suitable wiki and repository browser
software to integrate with, first, and except for the wiki (MoinMoin),
there are imho no obvious candidates.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Of the remaining two, Redmine imho has much better support for
multi-project scenarios, seems to support a broader range of
databases, and also provides much more functionality.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>It can also be much easier extended by Joe Average User because of
a plethora of plugins, supporting popular use cases.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Redmine appears to be easier to host than Roundup, using thin.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Links:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.roundup-tracker.org/">Roundup</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.bestpractical.com/">RT</a></li>
<li><a href="http://trac.edgewall.org/">Trac</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.redmine.org/">Redmine</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.otrs.org/">OTRS</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/">Jira</a></li>
</ul></div>