In later times NAV developers and users have been complaining about the speed and feel of Sourceforge.net as a tool in the development. Reporting bugs and issues should be extremly easy and fast, as this causes _more_ reports, and more information is allways good.

As for features we want this should the trick:

• Easy web-interface for external users/reporters
• E-mail interface for the developers (both ways)
• RPC-interface (or similar) for scripted behaviours
• Code integration/hosting (optional as Mercurial has a decent web interface on its own)
• Task (feature requests, long term issues and so forth) management
• Free of charge, or open source so we can host it ourselfs

Assignment of tasks, statuses and such is considered a must, so its not mentioned in the list.

I have selected the following systems for reviewing (please notify me if I've missed any other decent ones):

• Launchpad.net
• Trac
• Mantis

Metainfo: Launchpad is the bugtracking-software used by Ubuntu, a linux distribution driven by Canonical. Its well tested and under active development as ubuntu grows. Other major projects that use launchpad includes mysql, inkscape and bazaar.

Including login reporting a bug takes three clicks (unless launchpad thinks its a duplicate bug, then its four). The pages are very snappy, and the whole process shouldn't take more than a minute, depending on the complexity and the reporters writing speed.

From the bugs panel in launchpad, searching for a bug, and changing its status is 5 mouse clicks, which is quite acceptable. As a side note; every edit and change in launchpad is logged and revertable, so we get complete histories for each bug.

Launchpad offers a webinterface that bases it security upon gpg-signed emails. The signature must be registred in the launchpad system. This is done easily from their web interface. A typical bug-reporting email would look something like this:

From: Kristian Klette kristian.klette@uninett.no Subject: Netmap crashes on solaris To: new@bugs.launchpad.net

The netmap crashes on my solaris box.

affects nav

Notice the space before “affects”!

The rest of the email-interface features are explained here