[H-GEN] Request Tracker question

[Byron Ellacott]

Harry Phillips wrote:
> I know that some of the members of HUMBUG use RT and am wondering if it
> would suit my needs so I thought I would ask here after reading the RT web
> site.

We here at APNIC use RT2.  As far as I know, we're the largest user of 
RT by ticket volume; we have over 600,000 tickets in the system at the 
moment, and I prefer not to think how many email addresses we're storing.

RT2 does not scale to this size well.  We had to disable certain queries 
because they were causing massive joins and tying MySQL up for tens of 
minutes at a time.  We also had to pace ticket injection, because ticket 
creation is a lengthy and heavy weight process, and a constant trickle 
of them interferes with UI interaction.

The UI itself is also quite cumbersome.  There's a large volume of 
information presented on a basic ticket info display, and with the 
amount of data we have, this causes ticket display to be quite painfully 
slow.

Another thing to be wary of is that RT2 has a complete lack of 
protection against multiple submits and careless reloads.  It's quite 
easy to hit "reload" on a ticket display page, dismiss the "Resubmit 
POST" dialog out of hand, and discover you've sent an email twice, or 
created two tickets instead of one.

(We fixed that locally, but our fix causes its own problems, and a 
better fix should be forthcoming.)

I don't know how much of this RT3 solves, but our evaluation suggested 
that RT3 would gain us extraordinarily little, while requiring our 
userbase to be retrained to a new UI and the new concepts in RT3.

If you're only talking in the order of a few thousand tickets, with spam 
filtering done before ticket injection, you will likely not have the 
same set of problems.

> I have some regular clients and want to store their details. When creating a
> new ticket I want to be able to select them and have their details appear as
> part of the ticket.

I don't believe RT does this.  We've changed our ticket display page 
somewhat, so it might have originally, and it can almost certainly be 
modified to do so now.

> Eventually I want them to be able to login and enter their own tickets if
> they wish.

This is possible.

> Is RT or another Open Source system able to do that? Or do I have to develop
> my own?

Probably a bit of both.  You will probably be best off starting with an 
existing system and fitting it to your needs.  Issue tracking is 
something that differs greatly in the details.

I took a brief look at Roundup and Mantis, as suggested by Clinton and 
Greg respectively.  If you're not tracking software bugs, Mantis will 
probably be quite difficult to fit to your needs.  Roundup could have 
promise.

In your position, I would evaluate RT3 and Roundup to see which is the 
closest fit to your needs and which you can most easily modify to suit, 
then select one and modify it accordingly.

-- 
bje