Dear Lazyweb, can you recommend an issue tracker?

I’m looking for a free, open source web-based issue tracker that I can install and run. I would like it to be able to authenticate off LDAP and allow users to rate the importance of the fixing of each issue, as well as the usual commenting.

I already run Request Tracker and don’t really want to adapt that to do it, I’d prefer something simpler.

Any recommendations? Can trac do it?

Thanks!

Update:

davee pointed out that more info is probably needed.

It’s for feature requests for various bitfolk.com services. There’s lots of them outstanding, and they’re all good, but I have no idea which ones are in most demand from the customers. So I’d like:

  • for users to be able to submit ideas by web and possibly email
  • rate how much they want them implemented
  • for further discussion to be possible inside the issue tracker (web/email)

I know RT can be made to do it, but I currently have it set up for mostly individual customers to raise issues about their individual service, not for everyone to comment on stuff.

8 thoughts on “Dear Lazyweb, can you recommend an issue tracker?

  1. The critical thing here is: the best solution depends on what form the ‘issues’ take, and the type of person doing the reporting.

    If the issues are software bugs and the people reporting them are developers/coders/similar, then I’d recommend Bugzilla or perhaps, as you say, Trac.

    However, if the issues are more general IT support, Request Tracker is probably better.

    If the issues are in no way technical, then RT is probably still a good fit.

    Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_systems but I can give further recommendations if you provide more information 🙂

  2. davee, good point, I should probably elaborate.

    It’s for feature requests for various bitfolk.com services. There’s lots of them outstanding, and they’re all good, but I have no idea which ones are in most demand from the customers. So I’d like:

    – for users to be able to submit ideas by web and possibly email
    – rate how much they want them implemented
    – for further discussion to be possible inside the issue tracker (web/email)

    I know RT can be made to do it, but I currently have it set up for mostly individual customers to raise issues about their individual service, not for everyone to comment on stuff.

  3. Please no bugzilla – it’s not only fugly, but it always seems horrifically slow and hard to use.

    JIRA is the best I’ve used but it’s neither open source nor free (except for some cases).

    Redmine seems the best of what’s left – it’s got a good feature set, is fairly pretty, lots of plugins, just lacking a bit in usability nicities.

  4. For what it’s worth, I agree that Bugzilla may be a little ugly (although I’d call it basic, really) it certainly should not be slow. If it’s slow then you’ve got something seriously wrong with the system it’s hosted on. And ‘hard to use’ really depends on the audience, hence my initial question.

    Nothing further to add here, because it sounds like what you require is somewhat different to where my experience lies. 🙂

  5. To be fair the bugzilla’s I’ve used have been rather large (gnome, redhat etc). Minutes for replies, hard to filter. JIRA is way better than that, however the v4 interface is a retrograde step in many regards and their LDAP integration is still dreadfully lacking without writing manual sync scripts. Redmine OTOH works nicely 🙂

  6. I like trac quite a lot, though its custom fields could be better (I would like to be able to populate the custom fields with a sync from another database, but the config-file type setup will make that hard)

    Trac was trivial to install on a debian box, so you might want to find a spare box and put on apache and trac and play with it yourself

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