[Haskell-cafe] Announce: DisTract: Distributed Bug Tracker implemented in Haskell

[Matthew Sackman]

DisTract is a Distributed Bug Tracker.

We're all now familiar with working with distributed software control
systems, such as Monotone, Git, Darcs, Mercurial and others, but bug
trackers still seem to be fully stuck in the centralised model:
Bugzilla and Trac both have single centralised servers. This is
clearly wrong, as if you're able to work on the Train, off the
network and still perform local commits of code then surely you should
also be able to locally close bugs too.

DisTract allows you to manage bugs in a distributed manner through
your web-browser. Currently only Firefox is supported. The reason for
this is that there is no local server used, and so the web-browser
must directly (via Javascript) call programs on your local system. I
only know how to do this in Firefox. The distribution is achieved by
making use of a distributed software control system, Monotone. Thus
Monotone is used to move files across the network, perform merging
operations and track the development of every bug. Finally, the glue
in the middle that generates the HTML summaries and modifies the bugs
is written in Haskell.

The first version, 0.1 has just been released. There are missing
features currently, and I've only tested it on Linux. However, it
should work on OS X and Windows if you can make it compile! It's only
been tested with Monotone version 0.33.

http://www.distract.wellquite.org/

Many thanks,

Matthew