GitHub, the favorite repository hosting provider for many Ruby programmers, now also offers an issue tracker. The issue tracker is integrated with the project's repository: it is possible to modify tickets from within commit messages, and the commits then also contain links back to the ticket.
Other features include:
- Create and apply labels to issues to assign to users or categorize
- Vote on issues that you want to see tackled
- Search, sort, and filter
- Keyboard shortcuts
The interface seems to be very fast and easy, a demo session can be seen on their announcement blog.
Just two days after the announcement, GitHub released version 2 of their API, including Issue, "Repository, User, Commit, Object and Network APIs". The documentation for the API can be found on the GitHub developer site.
Various projects have already been started to migrate from an existing issue tracker to GitHub, for example Lighthouse and Trac.
With the issue tracker, GitHub gains another advantage over RubyForge. GitHub can now host your code, provides a RubyGems server (see the InfoQ coverage on GitHub vs RubyForge as Gem Source), a website, and now also the issue tracker.
Besides for hosting the official Gems - do you use RubyForge today?
