Well I think it’s the time for setting up a bug tracking system. There are 4 candidates: bugzilla, gnats, roundup, and trac.
Gnats is the most promising one before I started: It has been used for a long time and stable, it’s written in C, use a plain file system based database, and it is said that it’s “as configurable as Emacs”. Plus the FreeBSD project is using gnats, and there is Emacs support for it. And also planner support for it. However, when I tried it on my box, the gnatsd daemon always got a signal 10 and exited. I found an PR about signal 11, said it will be OK if build with -o instead of -o2. I gave it a try but steel no luck. And after I looked it up, I found it’s not as customizable as I thought. So I gave it up.
Bugzilla uses perl and mysql, no other options. I don’t know perl and I don’t know mysql. Someone said it’s pretty customizable as long as you know perl and how to customize it. However it’s pretty widely used. So I kept it as the last to consider in case all the others won’t fit.
trac and roundup are selected because these are the only two python based issue tracking system I know. And I think I can learn more about Python if I use them. However these two are all not widely used.
First I took a look at roundup. It comes with a demo and I played with it. One thing that I dislike is that it messed up “priority” and “category” in the FreeBSD gnats points of view into one. However when I run into the documents later, I found this is customizable. Just the demo happened to be configured this way. And while reading the document, I fount it’s really customizable. Nearly all the field are customizable, plus we can define actions. Also it support web interface, email interface, and command line interface. I love roundup! The only drawback is that there’s no Emacs interface for it. However I think I can write one with the command line interface or the Python interface with PyMacs.
Then trac. It’s a combination of bug tracking system, project management, code viewer, and wiki. However, it only provides web interface, which makes it pretty hard to write an Emacs interface. Also I don’t need all those features, and some components is not quite powerful, such as the project timeline. And the thing strike me out is, it only support subvision as version control system at the time. I’ve got used to tla/xtla and don’t want to learn another version control system….
So, roundup! It is installed and will need lots of customization….
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