In my old blog I hinted about a project that I’d been working on and was hoping to release. It’s getting closer to release, so Happy and I spent part of the day looking at “project” software. That’s some crappy nomenclature, but I lack a better term. I’m referring to software like Trac, Redmine, Jira, etc. Something that does issue tracking, maybe a wiki, maybe some forums and maybe some VCS integration.
Trac is out because it’s just awful. Puppet used to use it and I hated every second of it. It was hard to use, but moreover it was hard to read. Issues/Tickets/Bugs/Whatever looked terrible. Oh and the wiki syntax sucked too.
We tried Redmine today and being the ruby noobs that we are, it wasn’t exactly easy to get going. There’s a bug in the release version when using the version of ruby we had and coupled with a few other things that made me feel like it’d be fragile (which is another way of saying I wasn’t sure I was qualified to run it in production.)
Then in the last 10 minutes of the day we tried Jira and holy smokes! For a project our size this thing is enormous overkill. It’s also payware. They have an “open source” license, but the main qualifier to get said license seems to be “being cool enough.” Plus, I fucking despise java. That said, it’s quite a polished package and was amazingly easy to set up. It’s certainly far better than then issue tracking system my work is about to deploy.
So at this point I’m looking over wikipedia’s big comparison chart, but I’ve lost hope and am starting to think that we’ll just end up using smaller pieces rather than an all-in-one solution. For the first time in my approximately ten years of blogging I’m allowing people to comment on my blog! Why not make a suggestion of the kickass project software you use/wrote/love?