Slashdot Mirror
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?"
VMWar^WXen
I've used Mantis with great success for several years, both on Linux and Windows hosts. They also have limited support for SQL Server, which is somewhat unofficial with the current v0.19 release but official release will come with v1 next year. Enjoy!
Damien
RT is an enterprise-grade ticketing system which enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users. It is used by Fortune 100 companies, government agencies, educational institutions, and development organizations worldwide.
I have created a Windows port of RT, and have been maintaining it for two years now, selling support contracts for a living, as well as developing RT-Foundry, a project similar to GForge/Trac, on top of RT.
The RT-Win32 installer comes with its own Apache2, MySQL4.1, Perl 5.8.6 and Fetchmail, so you'd not need any other existing SQL server to set it up. I'd be happy if you'd give it a try. :)
I am in a similar situation, mostly Windows with a couple of HP-UX machines that I don't have real access to. I ended up installing Mantis Bug Tracker, http://www.mantisbt.org/. It's written in PHP and install time and complexity is low.
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.
We just went through this recently at my company.
Our first though was Bugzilla, of course. But after looking into actually deploying it we realized it wasn't going to be that easy. So before we buried ourselves, we looked around to make sure Bugzilla was actually the right choice for us.
Turns out it wasn't.
We found Atlassian's JIRA. Installs like a breeze, easy to manage, no headaches, even actively tied into Atlassian's JIRA bugtracking system for itself! (And it works, seen bugs that we have submitted fixed in short order!)
We're not a really big shop, so I can't speak too much from the large scale deployment end, but aside from that this was a fantastic choice for us and I highly recommend it. (I am in no way affiliated with Atlassian or JIRA)
No Comment.
Have you tried installing Cygwin to 'fool' Bugzilla into thinking it's running on Linux?
I'm not a hardcore Fogbugz user, but I've been involved with a few projects that had lightweight use of it, and I think it is quite nice. nice. It runs on Unix/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
It is not free as in beer. But it is quite reasonably priced imho. There's a free trial of course.
Check out their pages on How Fogbugz Works and Why Fogbugz Works
It's from Joel Splosky, writer of the JoelOnSoftware blog.
I have a friend that uses Colinux to run Debian on his Windows machine (it's essentially a VirtualPC type thing). You could pop the server onto that and it should work fine.
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
Edd Dumbill has a list of (mostly) free issue tracking systems. It's a very good starting point.
One of the most interesting systems in that list is (IMHO) Eventum, by the company that produces the commercial version of MySQL. It only needs PHP and MySQL, and should therefore run well on Windows. Be advised that I haven't actually tried it though.
Wenn ist das Nunstruck git und Slotermeyer? Ja!... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
I've set up bugzilla on windows following this tutorial and it works quite well.
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.
Just went over and looked at bugzilla.org. On the download page it says.
Windows users: It is now possible to install Bugzilla on Windows with very little if any modification to Bugzilla itself. See Byron Jones' Bugzilla Installation Guide for Windows for instructions.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
In the real world it does work like that.
You get a PII with 128 megs of ram that won't take XP or Win2kpro well, ask your boss to let you run some test or something, install linux, and presto, it works.
Then, when the company looks at the cost of keeping the PII as-is versus migrting to windows, they'll keep the PII.
Repeat.
I've done this. I'm on the third box.
Fortune 500.
"Piter, too, is dead."
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.
excellent product that i highly recommend. source is clean and installtion is easy. cost money but it relatively inexpensive, espicially if you work for a large company like me. customer listing is impressive (not that this means a great deal but certainly only helps): http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/customers.j sp
standard $1200
profession $2400
enterprise $4800
(you get the source for each edition and support for a year and i think upgrades for year)
for the war/webapp you need java, an application server (tomcat, jboss, ) and a relational database (postgres, mysql, ). or use there prepackaged/standalone version containing an application server (i think tomcat) and relational datbaase (i think hypersonic).
took me 15 minutes to setup the standalone version and about an hour to setup the webapp version. i write java webapps for a living, but if youve setup bugzilla before there documentation should be good enough for non java developers.
there is a 30 day trial, just download and install. no gimmicks.
i belive the current or next version implements a workflow engine (i think osworkflow) if you need it.
note that i am in no way affiliated with Atlassian and my remarks are based solely on memory so things could have changed.
Of course, one could argue that there have ever been a handful of viruses for Linux and that a Linux box can be configured to automatically upgrade itself - or easily upgraded manually.
But you're right that Windows shops don't want to have to employee a Linux administrator because of one application.
I've seen companies with Windows workstations and servers get roped into being a VAR for a Linux app and from that experience setup an internal Linux server. The number of Linux-based solutions increased since my hire, but it was always an issue of who else could support it if I wasn't there (sick, dead, quit, etc). Meanwhile, there are some people who you will find are viciously pro-Windows with a higher rank.. some people don't care what something does, how much it saves, but care that it isn't from someone that they trust.
Luckily, many killer business apps are now coming from IBM, Novell, and Sun.. and they're working on Linux. Considering Exchange? Consider GroupWise. Considering Microsoft Office? Consider OpenOffice.
I find that it is a lot easier to push Linux and Linux based solutions to management if it isn't from "Linus Torvalds", "ESR", or "RMS" (etc).. but from trusted sources like Novell.
I've convinced users to move from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice on the premise that they aren't using "freeware", they're using software from Sun Microsystems.
The idea used to be that to get users onto Linux there would need to be a killer app only for Linux. However, to convert users you don't want to give them a reason to leave Windows, you want to give them no reason to keep paying more money to run the same software.
We need applications to run on Windows AND Linux from brands (Windows) users already trust. I've found that users don't want a new word processor AND a new instant messanger AND a new web browser, etc. Firefox, OpenOffice, and other applications are making themselves available under Windows and will give users fewer reasons to stay with Windows.
Compared to the Linux version, the Windows version comes with pre summited bugs like:
"You have installed Windows." (WONTFIX)
or
"My computer crashes all the time." (NOTABUG, BUTMANYBUGS)
Enjoy! =)
use Mantis instead of bugzilla
it will run on Windows too
http://mantisbt.org/
---- Put Sig here:
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.