Free Bug Tracking Systems

In a previous company, an in-house-developed issue tracker was used and it is somewhat adequate but considering that that company was a small one, developing something like that in-house is a huge waste of resources when a lot of better-quality and free issue trackers are just a download away.

Currently, Bugzilla is used but I guess there are better free software than this. I just usually make use of the functions "Find a Specific Bug", and "Resolve bug, changing resolution to FIXED". The advanced query functions show just a lot of information in a very unstructured (and frustrating) way. Although I just usually make use of the two aforementioned functions, I feel that those two are already adequate. It's just frustrating that their other functions are not too impressive. And the UI is also unimpressive.

I came across MySQL's Eventum while browsing on information about their database. Eventum screenshots look good. I guess the project is still very young since its 1.1 version was released just last June 2004 and is currently in their 1.7.0 version.

I just heard of a project who migrated from JIRA to Mantis. I thought that must be something very good since JIRA seems to be very good already. It is among the 200 most active projects on sourceforge. This might be promising, but unfortunately, the website is hardly accessible today.

And then I came across this most promising project called Trac. One of the users on their list striked me: Ruby on Rails. Trac has integration with subversion as opposed to Eventum's CVS integration. Trac's timeline include integration with CVS and Arch though, while Eventum's roadmap does not mention integration with other version control systems.