Steven Yong's Weblog

After I found the CGI Perl based Bugzilla doesn't really solve the problem well, I went ahead for a PHP based system called Mantis which was recommended by the project manager of one of my previous projects. So sad to said that it was a little harder to get the system up and running than Bugzilla. Now that I know MySQL 4 doesn't really work fine with latest PHP 5 without some tedious hacks, instead it requires PHP 4, this is the part took me the most hours for this task. Luckily, integrating Apache2 with PHP is easy, just that I had to configure another directory for Mantis application because the document root directory has been occupied by Bugzilla.
However, Mantis gave me a pretty good first impression, at least much more better than Bugzilla. As a developer, I think I'd like to have something like this when tracking my issues or bugs:


Unfortunately Bugzilla doesn't seem to provide this kind of fundamental user experience, the closer page I can find is just like this:



I'm a bit embarrassed to say that I just know that actually there's a Java based bug tracking system (iTracker) currently running in my company which everyone has stop using. This open source project has been terminated and no further development will be activated. But this is not the reason we didn't want to use it, in fact it is hard to use and lack of features.
Actually there's a very good commercial product called JIRA, I had the chance to use it for a project and it gives me more than what I require and expect. But I simply just couldn't justify to management without literally evaluting some free products. Anyway, I find it fun and exciting setting up and trying out open source alternatives.

PS: Must we use version control system to maintain and control our internal documentation and specification (in case if you want to control)? Not really, next I'll be going to play around with Wiki.