I've been on one end or another of three Python based issue trackers lately -
Tracker, its descendant,
CMFCollector, and it's competition in the Software Carpentry contest,
Roundup. And there's always something there to make me unhappy.
Tracker is one of the best issue trackers I have used. It's got a fairly solid user interface, a fairly solid built in Workflow, and hierarchical correspondence/state changing. It's one of the easiest web based issue tracking systems to use to follow the actual history of an item, and it's easy to see at a glance how actively an issue was discussed/reported on in the Tracker from the issue listing page. And Tracker sends out
best emails of
any bug tracking system I've seen. Sadly, it's pretty much dead (and in fact - it's been core dumping on my when I've attempted to use it with Zope 2.5.1 and Python 2.1.2/2.1.3). You can see it still in full action as the
Tracker for the whole
CMF project.
CMFCollector is its replacement. I don't like it as much. It suffers from a flat transcript (by default in a non-monospaced font) that is harder to follow than the system used in Tracker. And the UI - by default - just isn't quite as much there, although this may be due to the pretty basic (or just plain weird) default CMF Skins. The pretty-much-default CMF Collector setup can be seen in action at
The Zope Issue Tracker. The
Plone (a massive skin/layer for the CMF) varation can be seen in action at
The Plone Issue Collector.
Roundup is not Zope based at all. It's a pure-python solution with a nice abstraction of layers (frontends/backends). It seems to be the most actively developed, but still feels young. Regardless of age, I've started installing it at work. The user interface is very basic (and kindof hard to read), and it suffers from the same flat-transcript issue that
CMFCollector does. But it's fast, simple, and fairly solid. It has a few options for submitting/modifying issues - by email, by command line, and through the web. It can run as a standalone web server, as a CGI script, or through "Zope" via a frontend called
ZRoundup. ZRoundup essentially passes and wraps Zope REQUEST data and passes it into Roundup, and returns the resulting HTML -- essentially a CGI-esque gateway for Zope. But it allows Roundup objects to be placed alongside other Zope content, like ZWiki's or just plain documents as part of a simple project management solution.
I miss Tracker. And CMFCollector isn't yet a worthy replacement for it. Roundup is small, fast, and looks to be broken out enough to be easily programmable. I may even look into getting involved with its development.