Trac vs. Mantis and MoinMoin vs. Sycamore

July 8, 2008

1. 

   There is a great comparison of issue trackers, both open source and otherwise at the link below,

   http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/2007/10/Links-to-other-comparisons-of-issue-trackers.aspx

   On the other hand, this is blatant self-promotion, but if you can afford a modest cost, I would recommend you look at fixx, our bug tracking solution for software teams at http://hedgehoglab.com/products/fixx

   Comment by Sarat Pediredla — July 9, 2008 @ 10:15 am

2. 

   Trac has an integrated wiki that’s not too shabby. Perhaps more important is that it has built-in markup help pages, but also includes an HTML escape hatch. The integrated linkage to ticket tracker or changesets is really nice.

   It has rough-grained permissions for people to have access to the wiki but not tickets, or code timeline, etc.

   I frankly don’t like MoinMoin at all, at least the version I used a few years ago.

   FWIW, git does have some integration with Trac via plugin; I’ve tested it a little, it seems to work.

   Comment by Jeremy Dunck — July 9, 2008 @ 3:33 pm

3. 

   @Sarat:

   Thank you for the pointer!

   @Jeremy:

   Agreed, Trac’s wiki is reasonable, and the ticket integration is nice. OTOH, Mantis’ built-in wiki looks none too shabby either. Since I have no Mantis experience, I’m basically left with comparing the tools’ documentation, which won’t give the whole story. Hence, my question…..

   Mantis tickets look spiffier than Trac’s, but I don’t know how much of that is useful in the long term. I was hoping that someone with equal experience in both would comment here and expound…

   MoinMoin being written in Python was what first attracted me. And it seems to have a boatload of features. It uses flat files instead of a dbms, which means less administration hassles and easier recovery from screw-ups, at least in theory.

   What didn’t you like about MoinMoin?

   Comment by John — July 10, 2008 @ 7:14 am

4. 

   I’ve used MoinMoin twice now. Once as the very first wiki / collaboration tool in a product development engineering team. Company had a bunch of stagnant & over-built theoretical processes, while practically it was entirely ad-hoc. 17 guys plus or minus, doing software and hardware (mainly integration) development.

   We used MoinMoin for general knowledge capture and to manage Tier III support. I found that when you get to Tier III – unexpected non-trivial functional errors with the product in the field – there is often a lot of investigation. Wiki fits that better vs. a completely defined workflow. Both the existing ticketing and support tracking systems were hostile to supporting capturing knowledge along the way.

   MoinMoin did well for us, including email integration, some templating, and similar. This was on Windows OSes. We were looking at reworking the whole tool chain & development environment, so we might have gone for something else with that refresh. Better integration with builds, repository & defect and support ticket tracking would have been nice. We weren’t there yet.

   This second time going on right now, we’re using MoinMoin to capture context info about a NOC. Even banged up Wiki login authenticated against LDAP with no problem. Interestingly, that location has Mantis installed, yet the concept of wiki / capturing folklore was news.

   FWIW I picked MoinMoin the first time from a short list of competent wikis *because* it was written in Python, or more precisely “not Perl.” Leaving aside the language wars, I had Perl programmers on the engineering team – mobile VPN written in C++. By choosing a Python vs. Perl-based wiki I reduced the temptation to hack at its implementation.

   I’ve heard good things about Trac, which if my memory serves is based on MoinMoin. Medio systems in town used it for some time, so if you know someone from there, they might have some insight.

   Comment by Jim Bullock — July 18, 2008 @ 11:05 am

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