Hi!

I'm searching for a sane tracking software, for developing medical devices. Let me explain:

At work, we are currently using a really old version of Jira, with add-ons for tracking requirements and product tests. It's so f*ed up that all attempts to update it fail. Updating was never easy, but the last available installer/updater package actively destroys configuration and database, rendering the installation unusable. The fine print: You need to be at the latest version to be able to migrate to the cloud Jira. We can't get to that version. Tech support is not helpful.

Now, we running one project in a cloud Jira setup, paid for by our customer. I always thought the user interface of the old server installation was bad, but the cloud user interface is a mine field. Ideally, you run it on a separate computer, with mouse and keyboard disconnected. Only connect them if you really want to interact with it. Because almost any key and any click anywhere on the user interface triggers some action, even in empty spaces. The screen is littered with junk that you don't need, stuff that you need is well hidden. And as if all of that was not worse enough, we completely give up control of the data we enter into the system. Atlassian as a long history of mishandling or deleting user data, and we legally have to keep that data. I don't see any sane way of doing that.

So, guess what? I want to get rid of Jira. I don't want to even have to think about migrating existing data from our existing Jira instances to cloud Jira, and I don't want to use cloud Jira. And as much as I would like to, I don't want to write my own system. I want an existing software, running on a local webserver. I would prefer open source software, so we could tweak things if we really need to. I don't think we need much tech support, so a "community support for free, pay for professional support" model (as for Proxmox or Virtualbox) would be ok. We could pay a license fee, but we are a small company. We mostly do small projects, so license fees that costs in the order of an entire project are simply impossible.

What do we need?

• local installation (no cloud)
• web-based
• runs on Linux
• preferably open source
• issue tracking
• requirement tracking
• tracking test plans and test plan execution (product validation, testing that you fulfilled all requirements)
• a way to import old (non-cloud) tickets from Jira, including how they are linked - a REST API might be sufficient, so I can scrape data from the existing Jira instances

The classic Bugzilla ticks almost all checkboxes, except that it can't do requirement tracking and test tracking. And it's name is burned because an unloved and unmaintained installation lingered around since well before I was hired. That's clearly not the fault of Bugzilla, but some people are just strange.

Before Jira, we (the software developers) starting using Redmine just for tracking issues, with the intention to make the entire company using it. Jira won because Redmine wasn't even invited to the race. Redmine has no requirement and test tracking, but at least it has interfaces to third party tools.

A final note: Jira (with pluins) integrates the bugtracker on the one hand and requirement / tests tracking on the other hand into a single software. We are used to it, but we don't need that integration. Some bug tickets may refer to requirements or tests, but that's all. There is no tracking, not even counting. Nobody checks how many bugs a requirement "attracted". It is convienient to just type FOO-123 and it will be converted to a link to a requirement, just like typing FOO-456 will be converted to a link to an issue. But honestly, copying https://reqs.example.com/req-tracker/req/FOO-123 from the browser's address line into a issue ticket would hurt nobody.

So, how do you track issues, requirements, tests? Do you know a software that might fit our needs?

Alexander

DocumentRoot /var/webapps/sandbox/public
 
 <FilesMatch "\.(?:cgi|shtml|phtml|php)$">
 SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
 </FilesMatch>
 <Directory "/var/webapps/sandbox/public">
 Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews +ExecCGI
 AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
 AllowOverride None
 Require all granted
 SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
 </Directory>
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /dispatch.cgi1ドル [QSA,L]
 # ScriptAlias / /var/webapps/sandbox/public/dispatch.cgi/
 <Location />
 # Set up your Dancer2 application
 SetHandler cgi-script
 AddHandler application/x-httpd-perl .cgi
 PerlSetEnv Dancer2_APP /var/webapps/sandbox/bin/app.pl
 PerlSetEnv DANCER2_CONFDIR /var/webapps/sandbox 
 PerlSetEnv DANCER_CONFDIR /var/webapps/sandbox 
 PerlSetEnv DANCER2_ENV development 
 </Location>
[download] 

# Your application's name
appname: "sandbox"
# We want to keep session data around so
engines: 
 session:
 YAML:
 session_dir: /tmp/dancer-sessionstore
engines:
 template:
 template_toolkit:
 start_tag: '<%'
 end_tag: '%>'
template: "template_toolkit"
session: YAML
# The default layout to use for your application (located in
# views/layouts/main.tt)
layout: "main"
# when the charset is set to UTF-8 Dancer2 will handle for you
# all the magic of encoding and decoding. You should not care
# about unicode within your app when this setting is set (recommended)
+.
charset: "UTF-8"
# template engine
# simple: default and very basic template engine
# template_toolkit: TT
# template: "simple"
plugins:
 Database:
 driver: 'mysql'
 database: 'vlabs'
 host:'something'
 port: 3306
 username: 'rouser'
 password: 'xxxxxxxxxx'
 connection_check_threshold: 10
[download] 

 debug "displaying login page";
 template 'login.tt', { path => param('requested_path') };
 debug "showed login page";
[download] 

[sandbox:12160] debug @2025年04月05日 15:07:00> displaying login page in /
+var/webapps/sandbox/public/../lib/sandbox.pm l. 45
[sandbox:12160] debug @2025年04月05日 15:07:00> showed login page in /var/
+webapps/sandbox/public/../lib/sandbox.pm l. 47
[download] 

In my code I frequently have to write conditions like this:

if (defined $string and $string ne "") {
 .....
}
[download] 

What I really want is to check if the string is not entirely empty. I would like to be able to do something like if ($string) but this would exclude "0".

So I hope that there is a shorter and nicer way to do this. For now I have been using a utility strempty subroutine which runs that check but I doubt it's idiomatic.

In my own code I try to have it so that empty strings are simply undef, where applicable, but sometimes it can't be helped and external modules don't follow this rule hence why I have to write these conditions.

if ($STRING =~ m/[^\x00-\xFF]{1}/)
{
 ...
}
[download] 

OR MAYBE:

if (length($STRING) > ($STRING =~ tr|\x00-\xFF|\x00-\xFF|))
{
 ...
}
[download] 

I can't think of anything better. Maybe this, but I bet it's slow:

sub isUnicode
{
 my $L = defined $_[0] ? length($_[0]) : 0;
 for (my $i = 0; $i < $L; $i++)
 {
 ord(substr($_[0], $i, 1)) < 256 or return 1;
 }
 return 0;
}
[download] 

Hello Monks,

I've recently learned about the DEFINE predicate and I'm testing it with a simple script that I wrote to practice Perl and regular expressions. The script simply checks for IPv4 or IPv6 addresses (I know there is a CPAN module for that, this is for me to practice), and I re-wrote the regular expression like so:

my $re = qr{
 (?>
 \b ((?&IPV6) | (?&IPV4)) \b
 )
 (?(DEFINE)
 (?<IPV6>
 ( ((?&H16) :){6} (?&LS32))
 | ( :: ((?&H16) :){5} (?&LS32))
 | (( (?&H16))? :: ((?&H16) :){4} (?&LS32))
 | ((((?&H16) :){0,1} (?&H16))? :: ((?&H16) :){3} (?&LS32))
 | ((((?&H16) :){0,2} (?&H16))? :: ((?&H16) :){2} (?&LS32))
 | ((((?&H16) :){0,3} (?&H16))? :: ((?&H16) :){1} (?&LS32))
 | ((((?&H16) :){0,4} (?&H16))? :: (?&LS32))
 | ((((?&H16) :){0,5} (?&H16))? :: (?&H16) )
 | ((((?&H16) :){0,6} (?&H16))? :: )
 )
 (?<LS32> ((?&H16) : (?&H16)) | (?&IPV4) )
 (?<H16> (?&HEX_DIGIT){1,4} )
 (?<HEX_DIGIT> [a-fA-F0-9] )
 (?<IPV4> ((?&DEC_OCTET)\.){3}(?&DEC_OCTET) )
 (?<DEC_OCTET> 25[0-5]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|\d\d|\d )
 (?<IP_VFUTURE>
 v(?&HEX_DIGIT)+\.((?&UNRESERVED) | (?&SUB_DELIMS) | : )+
 )
 (?<UNRESERVED>[a-zA-Z0-9\-\._~] )
 (?<SUB_DELIMS>[!\$&'\(\)\*\+,;=] )
 )
}x;
[download] 

It works, but it only seems to capture the first occurrence of an IP address on each line. For example:

if ("This is the same address in IPv6: 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 and 127.0.0.1" 
+=~ /$re/g ) {
 say $&;
 say 1ドル;
 say 2ドル;
}
[download] 

I was expecting to capture both IP addresses, but only the first is ever captured. Can anyone shed some light on how could I make this work in this way?

Thank you!