I've often spoke of how much I want an easy-to-use bug tracking software, but I never did much about it since no free package was able to satisfy everything that I needed. Specifically, free, open source and working with MySQL. A big plus would've been if it would've been written in C# or Boo.

Now, bug tracking is certainly not a hard problem, is mostly direct work against database, some reports and a lot of thinking about work flow. Beyond that, it's mostly grunt work of adding features that are neccecary, but quite boring. (Prove me wrong, show me a feature of a bug tracking system that excites you.) Create a way to search bugs with enough flexibility is a must, for example, but it isn't really interesting.

I've now found a package that I'm glad to be able to use: FlySpray is a free (LGPL) bug tracking software that has quite a bit of features that I consider neccecary, has a good UI (unlike some other systems) and seems to be capable. It has one big minus as far as I'm concerned, which is that it's written in PHP. I don't have anything against PHP*, but it does bring back the bad old days of ASP and the mess that can happen there.

Unline the usual, the longest part was not cutomizing the UI to integrate with the rest of the site (although it took quite some time). The long part was integrating with the bug tracking system (and vice versa). It had to do with writing shell scripts on a remote system which I only have shell access to. I'm not a unix guy, and shell scripts require some deep knowledge in the ability of the system in order to get them to work as expected. I couldn't even get the script to execute properly and in the end I just used FlySpray' script as is. In addition: command line editing seems to require far too much knowledge.

Anyway, you can see the latest addition to my sites here: http://bugs.ayende.com

* I was able to understand enough that I could dig in the code and fix some problems without ever writing a single line of PHP code.