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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Track Bugs For Personal Software Projects?
An anonymous reader writes "One of my personal software projects grows bigger than I thought and the bugs becomes too many to just remember. I looked around for an open source bugs tracking system but found no ideal solutions. Ideally I wanted a simple system that does not need server setup and extra database setup, and can run under Mac OS X. Another option is a cloud service if it's affordable enough. Any suggestions from Slashdot?"
Been using Mantis for years, easy to install, easy to setup, easy to manage.
They have a free plan - http://lighthouseapp.com/
I am not associated with them, nor employed by them. But I've used them for many projects now and been generally happy with the result.
How about JIRA? Used by Enterprises all over the place. You can get it OnDemand from Atlassian for $10 (which is actually just a donation to Room to Read). Check out http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/overview
When I need to set up a self-hosted project and bug tracker, I normally use Redmine, which is very easy to use. It's written with Ruby on Rails, and so should be relatively easy to get a local SQLite-backed copy running on Mac OS using Rails' built-in mini web server.
This post is overly complicated but some of its information may be useful:
http://www.redmine.org/boards/2/topics/2768
Fossil (http://www.fossil-scm.org) is just great: it allows you to manage your code, documentation (wiki) and tickets (bugs).
It's really small and lightweight, offers its own web interface and can be made to run on a central server with a CGI script. Oh, and it's free and open-source.
It also scales very well: for instance the entire NetBSD code base has fossil repositories.
I am currently re-starting some personal projects and I will be using fossil almost exclusively for these. It's simply fantastic.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
We use https://www.fogbugz.com/ and have been happy with it. It has more features than you'll need to a small project. They have free versions for single users.
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I tend to fix a bug as soon as I find it. That solves the problem of tracking them.
This isn't true at all.
What happens when you have more bugs than you have time to fix? How do you choose which to work on first? How do you remember which ones lead to data loss, and which ones have a workaround? How do you remember how to reproduce each bug? How do you manage patches? How do you remember which patches are compatible with other patches? How do you track the number of reported occurrences of a bug so you can prioritize your fixes more intelligently?
These things may be pointless in a small project where you can remember all that stuff, but just because it's a one-person project does not mean that it's not too big to get lost in.
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TortoiseSVN is easy enough to setup to run without a server locally and works great.
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/redmine Seriously. I had an issue tracker running in 5 minutes. By 15 minutes I had the settings the way I wanted it. They ship you a virtual machine image. You load it into VirtualBox and click start. The VM loads to a little screen that tells you what IP address the redmine is running at. It also has git i installed, and it was super quick to migrate my git repo into it. Since I use redmine with git, it's really handy because they are already integrated - when I put "refs #32" in my git commit message, it appears on ticket #32.
Emac's org-mode system is fantastic for things like this. It has TODO tracking with scheduling, etc, and you can put one file in each project or one global file for just you, or ... Your choice!
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