There has been a desire to add a bug tracker to BeClan for quite a while now. The im_kit project has gotten to a point where it would be useful, so a certain autralian keeps asking for one. Alongside that it’s a good thing to have anyway, just not something that has been high enough up the list of things to do that it’s gotten any serious attention.

having decided to add one, the next question was which? I like RT and have heard good things about it, but it’s perl based and the BeClan server isn’t running mod_perl. It does, however, run PHP so a PHP based solution seemed like the obvious answer. I looked at eventum which seemed too complex and not right for what BeClan needed. Mantis seemed like it was better but didn’t allow users to browse the bugs without logging in, something I was keen to avoid.

Flyspray seemed like a good solution, was “lightweight” and yet provided the features needed and gave a view of bugs without a need to login. It installed easily enough and so is now available at http://www.beclan.org/bugs/.

As always there will be a settling in time while people work out how to use it and those who need to admin it (me) get used to that side of things as well, but overall it looks like it’s a good solution for us.