This week, I installed Redmine to provide ticket tracking and documentation services for our web site, computers, life in the apartment, and other things. So far, I’ve been rather pleased with it.

Redmine is an integrated project manager combining an issue/bug tracker, wiki, document manager, and source repository viewer aimed at managing software projects. It’s rather similar to (and probably heavily inspired by) Trac. I’ve long had an affinity for Trac, and in some ways like it better, but Trac does not support multiple projects. Redmine does. This is fairly crucial for us; it lets us have the web site, computing infrastructure, and apartment each as their own project with their own sets (and types) of trackers while allowing us to view all open tickets in a unified view. With stock Trac, we would need to check multiple instances to see all our open tasks.

One minor snafu with Redmine is its lack of support for multiple source repositories per project. Trac has this in its 0.12multirepos branch (scheduled for inclusion in 0.12 when that is released, hopefully soon). Our web site is currently managed as multiple Mercurial repositories, nested using the Forest extension; multiple repository support handles this well. However, with subprojects and Redmine 0.9, it still works pretty well. In 0.9, subprojects can inherit milestones from their parent projects. The website engine is therefore a subproject of the website as a whole, and the website milestones show the tickets in the engine as well. It’s not quite as simple from the end user perspective as a single system, but it gets the job done.

In general, Redmine seems like it will serve us well. Deployment was pretty easy, too, so maintaining it shouldn’t be too hard. I also think it has promise for managing research projects in the university setting — the wiki and document managers can be used for developing research questions, etc., and the issue tracker used quite readily for keeping track of open questions and tasks.