Clarification/summary for the question — we’re looking for:
- a hosted bug tracking system,
- that is as convenient to use as lighthouse/github/launchpad,
- can deal with attachments,
- integrates email notifications and operations (implies operations in commit messages),
- has a script-friendly API,
- allows anonymous bug reports, or ones with an email but that do not require setting up an account for submission.
Lighthouse is close but fails on the last point, launchpad is similar, github also doesn’t handle attachments. Tender is great for the last point, but fails as a general bug tracking system (and it looks like its open-source version will be limited to basically being a forum).
We looked into a number of applications to install and setup — but with this range of requirements, they are always coming with a huge cost in terms of investing time in setting up and maintaining a working system.
In our (open-source) project we have been using Gnats for a really long time. It doing what it was designed to do fine, but that’s getting to be pretty inconvenient: it’s no longer maintained, has features that we never use, and lack features that we’d want to use… It doesn’t deal with attachments, has no easy way to perform actions via emails, no integration with commit messages, and a web interface that was designed for 90s browsers. So I’ve been looking around in an attempt to find something that could replace it, hopefully some hosted solution to avoid the setup/maintenance hassle.
Probably the most impressive tool that I’ve seen is lighthouse: it has a very nice and practical interface, properly deals with attachments, controllable via emails, and can respond to commands in commit messages. But… It doesn’t have any sane way to submit a bug anonymously — and that’s a major requirement, since we need any random user to be able to submit bugs through our IDE. (It seems that there is a possible hack to forward an email faking the From field, but that doesn’t work very well — specifically, the reporter should be included in the followup email exchange.) On the other side, there is the related tender tool, which is very good in that area, but is very basic otherwise — too basic to serve as a bug tracking system.
There’s a whole bunch of other sites that I’ve tried — it seems that all of them require submitters to have an account, so they don’t work well for our needs; as well as being limited in various other ways (don’t deal with attachments, no good email integration, etc etc). It doesn’t help that the meta-descriptions of these sites is usually pretty obscure: it took me hours to just figure out what tender/lighthouse are and how they’re related, and no site mentions its inability to receive bug reports without registration. (I’m looking only at open-source-friendly sites, since we don’t have any kind of budget for such things.)
There’s also the option of installing some system locally, but bug tracking systems tend to be monsters that I’d like to avoid configuring and maintaining, if possible.
So the question is: is there anything obvious that I’m missing? Or to make it more concrete: is there a good comparison page somewhere that lays out popular options and their respective features explicitly?
JIRA is free for open source projects. It’s far more user friendly than trac and bugzilla, and allows anonymous submissions and plugins. Unfortunately you’ll need to host it on your own server, but from personal experience I can tell you that all you need to do is install a database (it can run without; but that’s not a good idea) and it basically maintains itself.
Also is there a particular reason why Google Code or Sourceforge issue tracking tools wouldn’t work? You don’t need to use all their services if you don’t want, you could use them purely for issue tracking.