[olug] CVS Success Story

[Christopher Cashell]

At Wed, 12 May 04, Unidentified Flying Banana Jay Hannah, said:
> We looked at Bugzilla. I was really hoping to find an issue tracking  
> system that had email logging capacity: the ability to carry on an  
> entire email thread and all of that will get attached to the ticket  
> somehow (cc'ing the ticketing system, I assume?). Maybe that's not a  
> realistic goal. We haven't found a system that does what I was  
> picturing in my mind. Perhaps I just need to switch my expectations to  
> a web-centered messaging system like Bugzilla...

Check out Request Tracker[1].  It's a GPL'ed ticket/issue tracking
application written by Best Practical, using Perl.  In my opinion, it's
among the best general purpose ticket tracking programs available.  The
current version is Request Tracker 3 (rt3).  It utilizes an SQL database
for a back-end (PostgreSQL or MySQL).

It also has fairly nicely setup e-mail integration.  It will (depending
on how it's configured) e-mail the owner and/or submitter of changes to
a ticket, and any e-mails sent to that ticket (based on the subject of
the e-mail) will get added to that ticket's comments.

E-mail's sent to a specific (and setup) e-mail address can also be used
to create a new ticket, if the subject doesn't specify that it refers to
an old ticket.

If you'd like a demo of the program, as well as an example of where this
is being used in the real world right now, check out Perl's bug
tracker[2], http://rt.perl.org.

The one caveat I have is that rt3 can be a little demanding during the
install[3].  It's not that it's difficult, by any means.  rt3 just has a
large number of Perl dependancies.  rt3 does include a script to help
satisfy all dependancies, if desired, though.

I first setup rt3 a couple of months ago for a small group of people.
Initially, we were just setting it up to test it out, and we planned to
then try out a few other programs.  After a week or two, we decided we
didn't need to bother trying anything else.


 [1] http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/
 [2] Yep, that's right, Perl is currently using rt3 to manage its bug
     database.
 [3] Unless you're lucky enough to be using Debian, in which case doing
     apt-get install request-tracker3 is pretty much all it takes. ;-)

-- 
| Christopher
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| Here I stand.  I can do no other.              |
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