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Bugzilla on Windows?
slipandfall asks: "I just started work at a 100% Windows shop (no chance of changing this) and would love to implement Bugzilla for issue tracking but statements like this - 'Making Bugzilla work on Windows is still a painful processes.' in the
OS-Specific installation notes don't make it seem reasonable. Since there is no chance of using Linux/UNIX here, can I get people's experiences using Bugzilla on Windows or experience with a tool (open source or not) on Windows with similar notification, discussion and issue tracking features?"
To begin with Bugzilla is a very crude bugtracking system that is really only suited for open source projects. It reeks for more generalized issue tracking applications. If you set it up it isn't going to impress management on how cool OSS is. I would suggest looking online for other alternatives. I know that the guys at Tigris.org maintain a list of OSS alternatives, and have their own system wich I think is much nicer than Bugzilla.
In the real world it does not work like that. You see what the person was too polite to say was, "Please do not flame me with the fsck wins, go linux anyways, messages".
Really, if the person says you can not go to linux at his shop, just take him for his word. If you have nothing useful to add at this point, please keep it to yourself.
Or go ahead and say it anyways and just get mod'd down.
Mid-Eastern Pennsylvania Gaming Convention
Is bugzilla the simplest solution? (And I'm talking about installing it on linux, not the problematic windows installation)
Is bugzilla the right solution?
Your post is heavily assuming that Bugzilla is the right choice, actually, it's inferring that Bugzilla is the _only_ reasonable choice and that anyone that doesn't agree is a bigot and ignorant. Harsh. Your suggested course of action wouldn't get many people very far in this world. Don't like my way? then f'u. How's that supposed to help?
Anyways, my point is it's not as cut and dry as that.
Aside from that, I've now used a few different bug tracking systems. IMHO, Bugzilla is not the best, though it may be right for certain jobs. For a lot of projects, it's just confusing and overkill. Regardless, and this is the key point, linux vs windows has NO place in this argument. We're discussing bug tracking software. Choose your software based on your needs, and then deploy as appropriate. If the best choice ends up being Bugzilla on linux, then so be it. Notice that the decision here would be not choosing linux, but rather choosing the appropriate software.
No Comment.
I politely disagree.
All issues of whether bugzilla is really the right choice or not aside, this is precisely how Linux started making inroads in other corporations. Some tech guy needed a quick and easy way to do some sort of server where that server was way more trivial to implement on Linux than on Windows. So they quietly put Linux on that box, set up the server, and said to everyone, "Point your Internet Explorer to...", and was hailed a hero. Rare would be the person who would even think that the server wasn't Windows, or that would even care, as long as the solution worked.
Thus, I'd recommend that, in the future, when your manager says, "Solve this problem," and solving that problem is easier on Linux than on Windows, just do what your manager asks: solve the problem. Once it has been working for a few months, and you have a few Linux solutions, you can let them know how you solved their problem, and they may want to take a closer look. Or maybe not.
This is exactly right. Have you read the 22 Immutable Laws Of Branding?
One of the rules is about mindshare.
Want to type a document? Use Word.
Thats generally how people work. Very clever marketing. It used to be Ami Pro or Works or whatever. Internet Explorer. clever name. My mum could guess what it does, Firefox... nope she's gonna get confused. Thunderbird? who the hell thinks these names up? Geeks, not marketing departments. I love Linux and I run Gentoo on all my computers, but Microsoft proves how useful a marketing department is.
About a billion dollars useful.
That never ceases to amaze me. I've been an admin and have had to work around the constraints of a windows only shop (when a lot of network tools on *nix that aren't on windows would have helped), but I had to abide by the "windows only" standard.
Now, as a dev, I routinely have to listen to customers and write up requirements from what they say they need, their environment, etc.
If I pulled the "I don't care what you want, I'm doing X" routine, nobody would ever hire me again.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
The solution to your problem is to place a computer over there with Linux on it, and run BugZilla and all the required support software on that box. Then, put that one window manager that makes things look like Windows XP, and put a window in the middle of the screen labeled "BugZilla Server for Windows XP" with fake but real looking flashy statistics in that window. Nobody will ever know, because people who use Windows and have never been exposed to anything else are too stupid to figure out something like that.