Yes, its a cutsie name, but The Bug Genie is a PHP bug tracking system that is the opposite of Trac in the best possible ways.

First of all you create a MySQL database and copy The Bug Genie files to your web server. Then you go to your website, where The Web Genie greets you with a short setup. At the end, it gives you an administrator login and password and you’re ready to go.

It’s that simple to set up. No command line required.

The help is built right into the system in the form of little question marks strategically placed that you can click on. They usually answer any beginner questions you’ll have.

How to create users? Well you can do it quite easily, but why bother? Just let your users sign themselves up with their email address and create an account. Just like WordPress.

It’s very powerful and has Subversion integration. Actually, for my purposes, it’s a bit too powerful for the minor issue tracking I need, but after having worked at Microsoft and using their bug tracking, The Bug Genie seems better. It’s certainly prettier, and prettier than everything else out there as well.

I predict great things for The Bug Genie for a lot of great reasons, but maybe for no other reason than nobody can set up any of the other bug trackers without dedicating their life to them.

]]> http://designoplasty.com/2009/09/08/forget-trac-the-bug-genie-is-awesome/feed/ 0 http://designoplasty.com/2009/09/07/trac-bug-tracking-software-is-junk/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=trac-bug-tracking-software-is-junk http://designoplasty.com/2009/09/07/trac-bug-tracking-software-is-junk/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:30:46 +0000 Matt http://designoplasty.com/?p=952

I have just spent many hours of my life I will never get back trying to get the Trac bug tracking software set up. This software is truly junk.

It’s not just that I can’t get it work, it’s that it is written as best it can to make users not be able to use it. Clearly some people get it to work, and I imagine this takes many man hours to accomplish.

I’m even using Trac auto installed by Dreamhost, so I don’t even have to think about unpacking things or anything like that, I should have a Trac that’s just ready to go, but no, there’s no such thing.

First thing I want to do is login with my first username and password, right. Well I don’t have a first username and password. And when I click the login link, it says something like this Trac is not set up for user authentication.

Now, isn’t that just screaming to people “don’t use me!”? I mean, isn’t that the first thing everyone would want to do? Log in? Create users? But not with Trac, you have to prove to them that you’re worthy of using Trac. You do this by following many complex methods of manually creating a password file and then using various other methods of begging Trac to use it. This means configuring Apache and Trac, and if you’re lucky, various other Trac plugins.

And if you thought getting Trac to work was hard, just wait till you try to install a plugin! That’s another thing they’ve royally messed up.

I never got it to work. I never got a single user or password and never saw a login page. I also never saw a place where I might enter a bug, and remember, that was the whole purpose of doing this.

At this point I can say without doubt that Trac is not for you. It’s not for anyone. Don’t encourage them and don’t use the software. When you can log in (through the web) immediately after installing and create users, then maybe. But right now, it’s just junk. Trac is just a joke all the Trac developers play on their victims, don’t fall for it.

Firefox has released a security update. Firefox isn’t my primary browser, that’s Safari, so sometimes I feel like there’s a security update available every time I open Firefox or Opera.

Of course I test on them, though. I like that there are multiple browsers now, it’s a much healthier community. And they’re all better than Internet Explorer. Open source also seems to really work for browsers. I think any time you need to conform to standards, your product should be open source. If there’s predefined work that people can do for free, by all means, allow them to do it! I wonder if Microsoft is aware of that concept?

One thing I would like is for Firefox to render form elements, such as text inputs, the same as other browsers. Firefox adds some space around them that’s not styleable, so firefox inputs are always a couple of pixels bigger than they are in other browsers.

Oh Microsoft, will you ever learn? Only one day after downloading Internet Explorer 8, I ran into my first bug. And it’s not even tricky! It’s just something that should obviously be fine. (Watch, someone will point out my error now that I’ve said that!)

It’s on my political blog, The Politimat, and it’s just a paragraph next to a floated image. On all other browsers it looks correct. But on IE8 there’s blank line for some reason. I double checked my code, ran it through the W3C’s HTML Validation Service and everything comes up fine.

If anyone can see what’s causing this please inform me, but I kind of think since it shows up correctly on all other browsers, it validates, and it’s just plain obvious what should be happening, that it’s a bug in IE8. We’ll see.

I did some searching and found a work around. Apparently margins on nested blocks in Internet Explorer are buggy. To get things back into shape, you can force the parent, in my case a div, to “have layout” by specifying min-height of 1px. After that, margin-left starts working again.

Here’s what you want to avoid:

<button type="submit" class="foo" />

And instead just do this:

<button type="submit" class="foo"></button>

Now all of the problems Internet Explorer has caused for you will be solved… until you find the next problem. It just makes me think about how they say Acid2 is not a standard and therefore is less important. Yep, just keep telling yourself that Internet Explorer team. Things are already working great, how could you possibly improve?