We use Pivotal Tracker to manage all our development projects. It's not only a bugtracker, but extremely usefull if you have any kind of agile process.
Fossil SCM: <a href="http://fossil-scm.org/" rel="nofollow">http://fossil-scm.org/</a><p>Fossil is a DVCS + Wiki + Bug tracking, though you can choose not to use the DVCS part..<p>* Light-weight? yes. it's just a single executable <1MB<p>* Robust? maybe. Projects using Fossil: SQLite, Mongrel2 etc.
We use Lighthouse <a href="http://lighthouseapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://lighthouseapp.com/</a>
We needed a simple tool which can also be used by people who have minimal computer knowledge...
I absolutely love Fogbugz. I find Jira to be a bloated, complex mess. I've also used Trac and Bugzilla, both were clunky and lacking in creature comforts.
I am going to suggest JIRA. I think it is pretty lightweight. You can either run it with the built-in database or let it talk to MySQL or PostgreSQL. It runs without the use of an app server. Just unzip and run.<p><a href="http://atlassian.com/starter/" rel="nofollow">http://atlassian.com/starter/</a>
Other than text files, I've only used bugzilla, which is decidedly not "light-weight". How does trac fail to be "robust"? I've not seen any complaints about it scribbling all over its database.
We are huge fans of Mantis (www.mantisbt.org). It strikes me as lightweight compared to many solutions advertised here, and has the virtue of being agnostic between PostgreSQL and MySQL. It's also completely free.<p>We integrated it extensively with Subversion a few years ago, and there already exist pre-built Git integration modules for it. The plugin ecosystem has come a long way.<p>One important criteria to me personally was the suitability of it for use as a project management and/or feature roadmapping system, not just an actual _bug_ tracker per se, explicitly for bugs in the sense of defects. Mantis performs extremely well on this count as well.<p>Probably the biggest high-profile use of Mantis I know is Digium's issue tracker for Asterisk: <a href="http://issues.asterisk.org/" rel="nofollow">http://issues.asterisk.org/</a> -- you can see it in action there. Their particular use of it relies on Mantis's extensive ACL features (optional--you don't have to get that complicated if you don't want to!) to open the process of enrollment and bug submission to the public at large, to allow certain people intermediate levels of access (e.g. QA testers), and to impose an actual hierarchy of developers, managers and bug marshals inside the company.
I would like to suggest www.groupsense.com it is a bug tracking tool with social features. So you can follow bugs / people / projects.<p>So for e.g. You can follow a particular bug that you are interested in. Or you may follow a particular user who might have filled interesting bugs in the past.<p>You get an activity stream from the bugs/people/projects that you are following.<p>I am one of the co-founders so take it with a grain of salt.<p>I would be happy to hand hold you to implement this and add features if you need them.<p>Send me an email at vidushi@groupsense.com I promise you it is a new software but we have been using it internally for over a year it is stable and you will love it when in 15 seconds everyday you will be able to look at your activity stream and exactly know what is happening.
Not sure what you mean by more 'robust' than trac.<p>that said, we use redmine at work.<p>saw this the other day <a href="http://16bugs.com/" rel="nofollow">http://16bugs.com/</a> which looked like it might be interesting.
Shameless plug- my own app, <a href="http://trackjumper.com" rel="nofollow">http://trackjumper.com</a> is aimed at small teams with simple needs. No extra features and everything is unlimited.
JIRA.<p>It's the best bug tracker around. The only downside is that it is so configurable people will start using it or non-bug tracking things, which doesn't work well
Anything that ties into GitHub well? We just switched from SVN+Trac to GitHub. Considering still using Trac but wondering if any good alternatives exist.
Slightly off-topic, but if what annoy you in Trac is its setup or management, let me introduce pbp.recipe.trac ( <a href="http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pbp.recipe.trac" rel="nofollow">http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pbp.recipe.trac</a> ), a buildout recipe which can help you automate deployment and administration of several Trac instances.<p>And sorry to Hacker News community for this shameless self-promotion.