Friday, November 03, 2006

Bugzilla?!?! You gotta be Sh*tting me

It's been suggested that I look into BugZilla..
Ok.. So I've just been to look at...

http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/win32install.html

Holy crap but that's complicated.

That's just the sort of time I don't have.

The reason I mentioned FogBugz is that although it costs money (and yeah I already approached Joel for a freebie Single-User Support-the-Open-Source-Movement edition. But that wasn't going to happen.), It is very simple to setup and it is very intuitive to use.

How do I know this? Well my company (erm well ... the one I work for) bought a copy of FogBugz a few months back for our own use and I have to say it's wonderful. Not perfect (what is?) but really very good.

But hey, asking people for donations is still a bit lame I know. So I tripped out to the Bugzilla site and well how should I put this....?

I tend to judge the maintainability/security(and in fairness flexibility) of something by how many parts it is made up of and how long those parts take to setup initially.

Shall we say that Bugzilla was clearly developed with the *nix style user/developer in mind.


I couldn't in clear conscience install that software on any machine which wasn't mine unless I was spending all day every day learning about just how it worked so that I could be sure it didn't have any gapping security holes in it.

It might very well have none. I freely admit that it probably doesn't.

But I'd much rather stick to something based on MS SQL server and IIS.
(Probably because I know a little about how they work)

Oh and if I didn't mention it already, My company had already volunteered to host this little project for me (back when I asked Joel for a copy) as long as I could give them reasonable assurances as to the security, Lack of conflicts and generally not mashing up their machine for them.

With Bugzilla I'd have to spend far too long trying understand enough to appease my conscience.

Any other ideas?


4 comments:

Rory said...

Well Igor that certainly simplifies things for me.

Thanks very much

I should be able to at very least evaluate Bugzilla properly now.

I think I might be interested in using this oproduct from multiple real machines.

If I'm right, I could install the vmware player on each machine and then store the VM itself on my Ipod.

Ideally I will then (Assuming that Bugzilla itself is capable) set up a dedicated email pop box for users to send bug reports to and then each time I boot up my VM (whichever machine I run it from) it would scan said configured accounts and absorb the bug reports.


Do you think this is reasonable?

Unknown said...

Definitely the wrong route. For a simple and cheap tracker for bugs and features try: http://www.olate.co.uk/products/arctic/

One time fee, does the job!

Rory said...

well while the web site looks very nice, I tried the demo and so far I keep getting an error "Error Reporting

Unfortunately, an error has occurred while processing your request. Enable debug mode (includes/config.php) for more details. Sorry for the inconvenience.

File: /products/arctic/demo/index.php Line: 135" when I try to visit http://www.olate.co.uk/products/arctic/demo/index.php

Unknown said...

Seems to be back up now