This is an old revision of the document!
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:
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):
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
Launchpad offers a rpc-api through xmlrpc.launchpad.net/bugs/
Python example of usage:
from xmlrpclib import ServerProxy s = ServerProxy("https://kristian.klette@uninett.no:notmyrealpassword@xmlrpc.launchpad.net/bugs/") s.filebug(dict( product="nav", summary="Netmap crashes on solaris", comment="The new netmap crashes on my solaris box")) >> 'http://launchpad.net/bugs/xxx'
This enables us to have easy tools on a console level for reporting bugs, and maybe in the future even have automated bug reporting on crashes from nav.
Launchpad.net offers code-hosting of tarballs. It also supports mirroring of bzr-branches and svn-branches, but neither of these apply to us, as we use mercurial.
Task management in launchpad are provided through “blueprints”. Each blueprint has their own page, and can be assigned to people. These features seem to cover all our task-needs
Launchpad.net is closed source, so we cannot make changes to how things are done ourself. The service is free of charge, and they say they have a long term goal of becoming open source.