Slashdot Mirror
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.
check it in with your code, add and remove bugs as needed. 5 seconds of setup. Search and has a history.
Try Trello, it is simple enough to use, free and cloud based.
https://trello.com/
After every bug in my project you post a press release, discrediting the person who found the bug as some subversive agent, and explaining its uses of the bug in a positive light.
After the press release is done, I like to go into a dark room with a rocking chair, plug my ears and go LA LA LA really loudly until someone else says there is an other bug.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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)
> What happens when you have more bugs than you have time to fix?
You put a quick note in with a TODO tag
> How do you choose which to work on first?
You switch to a view that shows all your TODO tags and take your pick
> How do you remember which ones lead to data loss, and which ones have a workaround?
You type those details into the TODO tag
> How do you remember how to reproduce each bug?
See above
> How do you manage patches?
diff on commit = patch. no big deal.
> How do you remember which patches are compatible with other patches?
whatever man, you are really reaching here. make all patches compatible with all others, or pay the price. this is a personal project.
> How do you track the number of reported occurrences of a bug so you can prioritize your fixes more intelligently?
again, simply add this type of detail to your TODO tag
-Lod
sourceforge *is* a dead project.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I file mine in my todo.txt, which also includes missing features. Since I don't do a release if there are *any* known outstanding bugs, "bugs" and "incomplete features" are essentially the same for me.
So you never release?