Redmine and Jira

[Antranig Basman]

Hi there Jamon - thanks a lot for this experiment. I have to say at the 
outset I am quite pleased with Redmine... the rendering is a bit 
simplistic, but at the very least it is VERY QUICK. I could never 
understand why after so many years Atlassian showed such desultory 
interest in improving their really pretty incompetently slow load times. 
Pages on Redmine load pretty much instantly whereas even on a pretty 
fast connection I could wait 3-4 seconds before seeing any rendering on 
even a simple JIRA or Confluence page.

That said, I see a few important things missing that will make life a 
bit difficult - for example although redmins supports the concept of a 
"category" which I guess is the JIRA equivalent of a "component", it 
doesn't allow you to easily navigate to a set of issues that relate to 
that component. Also the JIRA feature of being able to prefix an issue 
with a "project code" such as FLUID, ENGAGE, or KETTLE was crucially 
useful to be able to keep issues referred to unambiguously when working 
on several projects. For example right now for me it is very important 
to be able to distinguish between CSPACE and FLUID issues.

The rendering of diffs and direct views into the repository are a very 
nice and welcome feature -
http://redmine.fluidproject.org/projects/fluid/repository/revisions/9992/diff/trunk/src/webapp/components/pager/js/Pager.js
this aspect reminds me of "trac" but redmine feels a bit better put 
together than trac - although I will reserve judgement until I can try 
out the wiki :)

The "activity" view is great. A joint stream of SVN and JIRA events is a 
really helpful resource.

Sadly the handling of URLs for search views is no more competent than in 
JIRA. For example in trying to create a view of "Framework" issues, 
after I apply the necessary filter, I get to yet another unbookmarkable 
view of the form
http://redmine.fluidproject.org/projects/fluid/issues?set_filter=1&tracker_id=1
You'd think that developers would start learning how the web was meant 
to work after a mere 20 years.

It's possible that some of these issues could be resolved by some 
configuration - or it might be, that, like JIRA, quite a few features 
are mysteriously "invisible" until you get an account and log on. It 
looks like my account is already imported, so if you could send me the 
details I'd be interested in trying it out further. Also I'd like to try 
out the wiki features but only get 404s so far when I try to navigate in 
- I'm much more dissatisfied with Confluence than I am with JIRA. I'm 
excited that the Redmine developers are open to accessibility work - and 
perhaps they would be more responsive to general feature requests too.

Overall I am impressed - I'm not sure I'm confident trusting all of our 
issue tracking to it immediately. I guess the only real "blocker" in my 
view is the lack of project prefixes on issue numbers. That seems to be 
a "must have" JIRA feature. Hopefully one can't patent something so 
trivial :)

Thanks for your work on this,
Cheers,
Antranig.

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> Hi all,
>
> As some know, I'm a fan of Redmine, which is an open source web based
> project management tool. It has a large community of users and
> developers, is much lighter than JIRA, and has built in Wiki, Forum, and
> source-code viewing capabilities amongst other things.
>
> At the moment I've managed to import all of Infusion, Engage, and
> Decapod JIRAs (including resolved ones) into
> http://redmine.fluidproject.org
>
> Everet Zufelt generously took it for a test drive yesterday with
> VoiceOver and reports that it is "quite a bit better than JIRA for
> navigation." He also noted that Redmine is open to working on a11y
> improvements.
>
> Colin Clark and Justin Obara have previously had a look at Redmine,
> would either of you two care to give some feedback on the latest import?
>
> What does the community think of trying out Redmine for Fluid issue
> tracking? Note that the import takes a few hours to complete, so I can't
> keep the redmine instance too up to date with Jira.
>