[Canberra-pm] perl bug ticket system

[Stephen Steneker]

> A colleague at work recently told me about a bug tracking/ticketing  
> tool called 'Trac' that he had been using for some time. Beyond  
> simple bug tracking, he claimed it also provided a nice, integrated  
> interface to Subversion (which sounded cool), so that a Subversion  
> check-in could simultaneously resolve an open Ticket.
>
> Intrigued, and a little excited, I did a bit of research...and  
> naturally had an adverse reaction to learn that it was written in  
> Python, which obviously meant Python had to be installed, and any  
> extensions had to be written in Python etc (of course it isn't  
> limited in any way in the files it is tracking bugs in!).
>
> Nonetheless I thought I would be a responsible member of the Perl  
> community and at least ask if there is a similar or equivalent  
> product out there written in Perl (or at least Perl friendly). If it  
> talks to Subversion all the better!

Hi Michael,

A Perlish equivalent would be:
    Request Tracker - http://bestpractical.com/rt/
+ RT::Integration::SVN - http://search.cpan.org/dist/RT-Integration-SVN/

Having used both Trac + RT, I much prefer RT's more advanced ticketing
and permission support.  In particular you can easily set up inter- 
ticket
dependencies and relationships, and also manage permissions by
queue, group, or user.   RT is also designed to accommodate plugins
and UI extensions.

Trac does have the bonus of a basic wiki and subversion viewer ..
although it's just as easy to install separate apps for this.  There
are several diff't perl-based wikis and svn viewers, depending
on your feature needs.  Language preferences aside, though,
mediawiki (php) is dead easy and feature rich .. and there are
some nifty perl interfaces like:
  http://search.cpan.org/dist/WWW-Mediawiki-Client/

Another caveat .. not sure if this is still true, but older versions of
Trac wanted write access to the repository *and* to be hosted on
the same server.  I /think/ they've finally added support for different
repository types in the most recent version, but haven't tried it
(we use svn+ssh://).

Cheers,
Stephen