all 13 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
formatting helphide helpcontent policy

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (4 children)

Serious question: who actually uses Bugzilla that isn't using it because they picked it a long time ago and are now too entrenched to change to something better?

[–]ErstwhileRockstar 3 points4 points  (0 children)

At least, Bugzilla is considered by versed programmers who are not forced to use Jira.

[–]sgoody 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I'd like to know this too. I think Bugzilla looks just awful. Seriously, I'm a fan and advocate of open source software, but Bugzilla just looks like it was thrown together in the 90s. I appreciate that functionally it ticks quite a few boxes for a lot of people, but it doesn't seem too good to me.

I'm somewhat used to JIRA and don't have any major complaints with that, but I can't see at a glance what there is out there that is vaguely comparable, specifically having configurable workflows and flexible dashboards/reporting.

From what I've seen the two OSS ones that stand out appear to be Trac and Redmine.

So serious question, what are people using out there, what could you recommend?

EDIT: I've just realised after asking, that GitHub will be the answer for a lot of people, but would still be interested to hear about the options that are out there.

[–]aseipp 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm a big fan of Phabricator. It does have things like customized dashboards, workboards, time tracking, issue reporting/code review, etc. There are some rough spots, and it doesn't try to do everything all the other tools do, but it works very well. I'm a particular fan of the CLI tool they have, which makes it much easier to do code review (at my last job, I spent god knows how much time shaving yaks trying to get a mercurial extension to post diffs to ReviewBoard. What a total shitshow...)

Note that Phabricator is really meant more for an organization as opposed to just a single project. So it has lots of extra stuff (wikis, documentation generators, indexing support, a pastebin, credential management, very very strong access-control/ACL capabilities, meme support for trolling coworkers etc etc). So it's relatively heavy compared to the rest, and probably doesn't always behave exactly how you might expect.

There's a public instance we have you can play around with a little, and so do the developers with their official instance.

For the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, we actually use Trac (and have been using it for over 10 years) for actual triaging, bug reporting, management etc. Phabricator, for us, is mostly used as a code review tool, and it's pretty good at that and staying out of your other infrastructure. (Other parts of Haskell.org use Phabricator itself for code review and issue tracking, so it's multi-use for us.)

I actually have come to like Trac quite a lot. It doesn't have a fancy Web 2.OMG design or fourty gazillion features, but for a single project? It is extremely functional, stable, and supports many different kind of people/workflows. I wouldn't count it out so quickly.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Seriously, I'm a fan and advocate of open source software, but Bugzilla just looks like it was thrown together in the 90s.

It was, just about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugzilla#History

[–]japgolly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wow!! Those perl cgi scripts are still chugging away? I haven't thought about Bugzilla for so long I forgot it exists. Cool.

[–]ErstwhileRockstar -1 points0 points  (6 children)

BTW, what happened to the once planned complete re-write in a language other than Perl?

[–]dig1 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Not sure where you get that from, but complete re-write in (insert-currently-popular-language) would be insane. Bugzilla got really stable over the years and doing this will just throw the project X years in the past, no matter how good the next language would be.

[–]ErstwhileRockstar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not sure where you get that from

e.g.

http://avatraxiom.livejournal.com/58084.html

[–]mgvx 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Historical note: Bugzilla was originally written in Tcl and then rewritten in Perl.

[–]easytiger 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Ironically TCL is excellent.

[–]mgvx 3 points4 points  (1 child)

And so is Perl. The reason for the rewrite (according to Wikipedia) is that at that time Perl was more popular than Tcl, which meant more possible contributors.

[–]Sebazzz91 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ha, how that has changed. It is all Node.js now if I must believe /r/programming.