Binary Code

(I do love a sensational headline.)

The guys at Panic (makers of the most excellent Transmit and Coda) were recently in the market for a new bug tracker to replace their own home-grown in-house app.

It seems they’ve settle on Redmine, an open-source bug tracker created by Jean-Philippe Lang and built atop Ruby on Rails.

In the past three weeks I’ve performed two Redmine installs under Ubuntu, both running Passenger (mod_rails) (which works amazingly well and I’m going to write more about that in a bit), one for work and one at home and I must say, Redmine is extremely impressive, particularly for something still versioned at v0.7.

Particular features of note:

• git integration. Actually Redmine appears to integrate with damn near every popular SCM but I’ve wanted to check out git for some time now and it was the perfect excuse to switch over my side-project. I delight in the in-browser diff viewing.
• Configurable project features. Modules of functionality can be turned on or off per project. I have no need for the wiki or news on my home project so I checked off the feature and it disappeared, simplifying my overview. I like that.
• Rails-based. Blah blah fix it yourself. Blah blah beholden to no vendor. Blah blah control your data. Rails is just fun, Ruby is just fun, both far more fun than monkeying with PHP, for instance. And reading the Redmine code is often a pleasure through which I’ve learned a few tricks (check out role.rb for has_many block trickery, for instance).

If you’re in the market for a bug tracker/project tracker, I recommend checking it out. It’s not yet FogBugz slick but it’s certainly head and shoulders above most of the rest of the market.