Any links to previous discussions about this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
In my mind the choice of bug trackers comes down to who is the intended audience for it. Is it used for tracking issues by just the developers, or do end users also have access to it (You need a straightforward reporting method - users get very confised)?
You didn't say if you want to use a web-based tracker, or a desktop based version.
Briefly some of my thoughts on some web based trackers:
- Flyspray - I discounted this because it didn't support custom fields at the time. A quick googling shows this feature is in development.
- Trac - Horribly confusing for my bug reporters. Has so many features that's easy to get sidetracked into other parts (such as wiki) and content sprawl. Difficult to theme if you have a standard layout for a public site. It has a very cumbersome flow from visiting the tracker to getting an issue filed properly.
- Mantis - At first it looks really ugly but I've been overjoyed with it. It supported custom fields like I wanted. It was SO customisable. A limited amount can be done through a GUI but there are an insane number of items that can be configured through the config file. A downside to mantis was the awful documentation.
Mantis does have some SVN integration if you're willing to dig through the source code and set it up manually. It's possible setup a SVN commit hook to automatically resolve bugs in the tracker that contain strings like "fixed bug 25" (again, customisable through regular expressions) or a bug is referenced in commit messages, that commit can be added automatically as a note to the bug. (This is in the manual)
I also really liked mantis security groups. It's very flexible when you look at the config files (useful if you have end users submitting say sensitive attachments and only want devs/admins to access it), etc...
It's open source and built in Rails, and it's easy to tweak to suit your needs (via a plugin system) and perfect if you want to get your feet wet with Rails.
As for speed, I'm using it on a shared host with Passenger and it fast enough. Speed on a VPS is quite nice, and it flies on a local network.
I recommend to turn off features you do not need and ignore those, you cannot turn of. It will be easier to work with.
Roundup, FlySpray, Trac, and RT
We currently use FlySpray, because it integrates with our Joomla website reasonably nicely. Roundup is probably the most comprehensive issue tracker of the lot, in the sense that extending it is trivial (just add whatever you want to the db, and the UI adapts). RT is probably the most mature and FlySpray the least so, but all are stable and work reliably.
Trac, of course, is the only one of those that integrates with SVN.
All are plenty fast and easy to install (all have a dependency or two or three, but nothing onerous).
Does not do all you want... No IRC and no SVN integration. That's pretty limiting if you actually do need that stuff. Go the TRAC route someone else mentioned if you really do require SVN integration.