Request for Comment on OTRS

[HyperZonk]

Fellow Monks:

We are thinking about implementing an online trouble ticket system. The most obvious choice (to me) appears to be The Open source Ticket Request System. I was wondering if anyone here has had any experience with OTRS or has reviewed the code.

Much appreciation for any information you can provide!

janitored by ybiC: Fixed broken OTRS URL

[InfiniteSilence]

I looked at the code briefly and I noticed a few things you should concern yourself with.

Here's a code snipped from the index.pl:

 my $User = $CommonObject{ParamObject}->GetParam(Param => 'User') || '
+';
    my $Pw = $CommonObject{ParamObject}->GetParam(Param => 'Password')
+ || '';

I don't know about you but this seems like a hell of a lot of overhead to get a darn username and password! The CGI stuff should be a higher level object rather than nested down so far. Looking randomly at other code makes me think that OO programming went to some kind of extreme here. Perhaps the developers are used to another language?

Also, if I am right and the index.pl file is the starting point for this program (didn't have enough time to read the DOCS, sorry!) then it is NOT running in taint mode, which is not a problem if you are doing all of the stuff that taint mode insists that you do, but somehow I don't think that it is the case here. You are welcome to check for youself though.

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
  #where art thou?

Lastly, there are tons of .DTL files which looks like some kind of proprietary version of Embperl. I probably would have just used Embperl instead unless there was a good reason not to use it.

[HyperZonk]

InfiniteSilence:

Thanks for taking the time to look at it! Actually, I was hoping for feedback from someone who had already taken the time and/or implemented it, as the codebase is far too large for a really thorough review on such short notice.

Still, your comments are helpful. I'd say I was just going to add my own -T, but we'll have to see if that breaks anything or not (if we decide to use it).

[Corion]

I never heard of OTRS, and just because (or maybe even especially because) it has "Open Source" in its main program name, that's no sign of good, mature or solid code.

The "most obvious" choice in trouble ticketing systems for Perl is RT, as it is used by Perl itself and by CPAN to track bugs in modules.

Another system I have administered (and not just used, as RT) is Bugzilla, the trouble ticket system used by the Mozilla team - it was at the time a bunch of monstrous CGI scripts that amazingly did what they were told to, but they weren't that manageable / changeable.

I know that this dosen't help you in your evaluation of OTRS, but it seems to me that you haven't seen more obvious choices than OTRS yet :-)

[HyperZonk]

Corion:

Thanks for your input. Actually, we use Bugzilla for internal trouble ticketing; we considered using a new instance of same for external, but IT management wants something more "customer-centric" for clients ... whatever.

Thanks for the tip on RT. I'll add it to the evaluation list. Anyone who has any experience administering RT, please consider this an additional request for comment on it as well.

Another great use for PM: hundreds of extra eyes reviewing possible implementations!