June 01, 2008

Issue tracking for free

I dislike switching tracks as much as anyone, but after Steven Frank’s twitter post the other night about Redmine (http://www.redmine.org/), I needed to try it out. I’ve been a long-time user of Edgewall’s Trac (http://trac.edgewall.com/) using it in my day job for about 3 years now - and I love it, it’s simple, clean and fast. But it’s a pain in the proverbial to get running due to some oddball dependencies, and it’s really only suited to a single product per-instance.

Redmine runs on a bog-standard Ruby on Rails install (which my host of choice - http://dreamhost.com/ - supports out of the box) and it appears to be as simple as Trac to use.

So I’ve decided to trial it for Hyperspaces - once I’ve released the public beta, there will be ties from the app to report issues directly into our Redmine set-up. If you want to sign-up for an account now and have a look around, feel free - you can find it at http://issues.thecocoabots.com/.