I have begun using Eventum as an Issue Management system, and am very impressed with it. It was not my initial choice, as there are a lot of systems out there, I tried some .NET versions and PHP versions. The one feature that they almost all seem to have in common is that they were very difficult to install, so Eventum was really a default choice.

Eventum just installed with no fuss. It is easy to use and has all the features I wanted. The presentatin is somewhat ugly, it is really a functional design rather than an attractive design. There are a couple of little annoyances like when creating a new project you have to create a new list of priorities (I use Criticial, High, Medium and Low). I haven't discovered a way to automatically add particular users as subscribers to each new issue. Having said all that, these are minor considerations for a free and well thought out bug tracking system. One of the features I particularly like is the ability to register phone calls to issues. In combination with the time entries, it makes it a lot easier to determine the true cost of resolving issues.

This software was developed by the MySQL AB Technical Support team for internal use, and they have generously made it available as open Source under the GNU GPL. It can be downloaded from here.

It would be interesting to hear if anyone else had the same issues installing other issue/bug tracking software. It was a disappointment as so many of them looked very impressive but just wouldn't install without an unreasonable amount of work. I am a great believer that software should just install, and if there are any confiiguration issues then the software should let the user know. Luckily for me the dead ends I went down ended up leading to a great solution which answers all my needs. Thank you to the MySQL AB Technical Support team for this great system!