Author: Leonid Mamchenkov

MantisBT vs. RT3

I’ve been praising Best Pratical’s RT3 (aka Request Tracker) for a long time.  So at my new job, given a new start, I thought that I maybe need to explore other options and widen my horizons.  After all, the needs were much less and much simpler.  We just needed a bug tracking application for three people or so and for a single project.  There was a possibility of more people joining the team later and more projects starting up, so I didn’t want to limit ourselves too much.  But immediate needs were quite simple.

After a good look around, I decided to give Mantis Bug Tracker another try.  I remember using it for a bit back when the project just started.  I even remember patching it to fit my needs back then.

During those few years that I haven’t looked at MantisBT it grew and developed quite a bit.  It is a stable, feature-rich, yet simple to manage application.  We’ve used it for the whole two month before our needs changed again and we started looking back at RT3.  Never-the-less I am glad we used it and got experience with another tool.  I got a few ideas out of it, which I will be implementing in our new RT3 installation.  Below are the few things that I loved and hated about the MantisBT.  Maybe you’ll find them useful.

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Google services via command line

I don’t know how I missed the announcement and why there is no noise around this release, but here it goes.  GoogleCL is a tool that you use from the command line to access Google web services.  I just installed it on my Fedora 13 laptop and its awesome!

Here is what you need to do to intall

$ sudo yum install python-gdata
$ wget http://googlecl.googlecode.com/files/googlecl-0.9.7.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf googlecl-0.9.7.tar.gz
$ cd googlecl-0.9.7
$ sudo python setup.py install

Here are some of the things that you can do.  And I guess more is coming shortly.

The first time you’ll connect to any of the Google web services using this tool, you’ll need to authenticate and grant access to the application.  After that – it’s all pure honey.