Has anyone had experience with Redmine [1]? It's quite easy to use and extend via its plugin system, but I don't see many people who have encountered it in the wild.
I think its horrendous out-of-the-box look-and-feel detract heavily from its appeal. Nowadays I'd probably lean toward Gitlab, which seems to offer much of the same but appears much more modern.
I use Redmine at my current employer, and I really like it. Reminds me a lot of Trac, which I used two companies ago and loved.
By the way, at my last employer, we rapidly switched between a number of trackers. At first, we used Unfuddle for our proprietary projects and Assembla's custom Trac for our open-source projects. Well, theoretically at least; in practice, we did very little with Assembla as a bug tracker (which is a shame, because I love Trac). At some point, we switched to using OpenERP for everything. it was terrible. Then we switched to JIRA, and it was only slightly less terrible.
Having used FogBugz, JIRA, and RedMine, as a developer, my order of preference is:
1 - fogbugz
2 - redmine
3 - jira
I actually found myself pretty comfortable with Redmine's UI and its integrated wiki. Fogbugz was very easy for me to use, but I last used it ~7 years ago.
It may be possible to get JIRA configured so it works nicely, but in general I find I am always running into some kind of workflow issues. It does work, it just seems to take more effort and sometimes me or my teammates come up with ways to work around things that are broken or just not smooth and that we don't have access rights to debug or fix.
We used Redmine for a while, but never got the Ruby stack to perform good (we are a PHP shop, so..). I remember the insane version dependencies ("redmine revision x to y needs package P in revision a to b") and that it seemed to stagnate in its development.
In the end I'm happy we ditched it in favor of Trello.
Love Trello. I'd like a locally installable version of that integrated with something like Gitlab (maybe this already exists, I haven't bothered to look).
It always seemed a bit slow to me as well. The dependencies issue may be fixed with modern usage of rvm-/rbenv-type things, but I haven't messed with Redmine for a couple years. It's funny you mention the pace of development too; the community actually forked at once point [1], I believe due to frustration with how the development community was being handled. That fork is dead now though.
> Out of the box, it's ugly, but -frankly- who cares? We're all programmers here
Uhh, humans? ;)
I find a better-looking tool to be more pleasant to work with, and Redmine was not-as-painful-but-almost as JIRA for me, for the experience being so poor.
I think its horrendous out-of-the-box look-and-feel detract heavily from its appeal. Nowadays I'd probably lean toward Gitlab, which seems to offer much of the same but appears much more modern.
[1] https://www.redmine.org/