issue tracking

Cross-posting from http://drupal.org/node/77562 ...

We've seen explosive growth in 2005 and 2006 based the ability for Drupal sites to rapidly deploy new features that meet real world customer needs, not just fulfill technical requirements. This project aims to increase consultant and site administrators ability to effectively manage releases, security, versioning, issue tracking, and feature deployment into customer ready production environments. By directly improving the Drupal.org release and project management infrastructure we will speed up the life cycle for meeting customer and user requirements and ultimately improve the ability to manage Drupal web sites. Donating to this effort (via the PayPal link on the full proposal) provides funding to accelerate volunteer contributions the Drupal.org project maintainers have made over the past 8 months.

Overview

• Contributions will have real releases and version strings, just like Drupal core itself
• Security announcements will refer to exact versions of modules that are effected
• Issues will be tracked by the exact version number of the contribution where the bug is present
• Development branches for any given version of the Drupal core -- maintainers can add new features to their module or theme without endangering the stability of other code that is compatible with the same version of Drupal core.
• All contributions will be clearly identified with the version of Drupal core they are compatible with

For the rest of the proposal, please see the full post on drupal.org.

Trac[1] and JIRA[2] seem to be likely candidates whenever software development projects need issue tracking, revision control, and wiki-esque functionality all integrated nicely. Trac is itself open source, and JIRA, while not open, is at least free for open source projects to use[3].

the #1 unmet requirement for converting my entire day job's content management needs to drupal is the fact that we currently handle a lot of our content via email. i need a way to plug these existing email addresses into my new drupal site and have the content flow in both directions.

in particular, we use email-based issue-tracking systems, and our entire userbase is used to sending support questions and bug reports to an email address, not going to a web site and filling out a form. similarly, there's a big global email list where people can ask support questions and other users try to answer. this serves much the same function as the forums on drupal.org: clueful users who aren't quite clueful enough to be developers can handle the 1st-tier support questions, and leave the developers more time to write code instead of answering silly questions.