Cyclic Jitterbug page

Jitterbug is a free bug-tracking system. That is, it provides a mechanism to maintain a database of problem reports and the status of resolving each one and produce reports from that database.

Jitterbug Summary

Here are a few pros and cons of Jitterbug compared with other bug-tracking systems. The disclaimer is that our experience with Jitterbug is limited so none of this should be taken as gospel.

Strengths:

• Web interface. At first glance it looked a lot nicer than the wwwgnats web interface for GNATS.
• Configurable states. The web interface offers a "create new directory" button which adds a new state.

• Uh, mainly I don't know Jitterbug well enough yet to comment intelligently on this. Issues I want to look at are how it integrates with email (the email integration looks good but I haven't tried it), emacs/tk/etc user interfaces (e.g., would one want such a thing?), reporting (e.g. equivalents to the GNATS query-pr command).
• There is no way to set up multiple categories (for example, "jitterbug", "samba", &c) and be able to move problem reports from one category to another.
• Not clear to me whether it would be good for tracking telephone calls and other "quickie" support requests (for example, how long does it take to submit a new problem report into the system?).
• Documentation is an acknowledged weakness.

Jitterbug and CVS

The Jitterbug web site has an interesting example of using Jitterbug to log CVS commit messages. This is a straightforward matter of gluing together the usual CVS email features with Jitterbug, but it might open the door for interesting things.

Jitterbug and GNATS

I am curious to see what it would be like to modify Jitterbug to run as a web interface to the GNATS bug-tracking system. This would be particularly interesting for sites who are already running GNATS and are used to it, but might (or might not) have other advantages too.

Mailing lists and newsgroups

There is a mailing list for discussions concerning Jitterbug. To subscribe send a message to listproc@samba.anu.edu.au whose body consists of "subscribe jitterbug your full name" where your full name is for example "John Smith".

Traffic on the mailing list has been one message per day or less, but this is a new list so it is hard to tell.

The newsgroup for Jitterbug (and other bug tracking and version control systems) is comp.software.config-mgmt.

Downloading Jitterbug

I suppose we need to make an explicit disclaimer that the Jitterbug distributions listed below are not supported by Cyclic.

Download the Jitterbug release from the official Jitterbug page mentioned below. It says it currently requires a "vaguely Unix-like operating system" (and a web server, of course).

For more information

Projects using Jitterbug.

Official Jitterbug page.

LinuxCare's page concerning their own version of jitterbug and their jitterbug hosting services.