@dhx, I would rather if we find a way to provide an up to date version of this project with low overheads. This provides a simple way for users to try out MantisBT. If I remember correctly, this package was popular in terms of downloads.

The goal is to find a compact and well maintained runtime environment including apache, php, and mysql.

What do you think?

I suggest a mantisbt liveCD: stick it in your PC or VM, boot it and browse to the pre-configured mantis instance...

Is this a Linux based solution? How big would the install be? Can you provide links for how this can be done? distribution that you are recommending?

The good thing about Instant Mantis was that the download was about 20MB and users could use for single user / small installations. For example, you could run it on your notebook or run it on your desktop and share it with one other person.

Here are my priorities:

P1: Easy for anyone to run.
P1: Relatively small install.
P2: Could be usable for very small teams.

I would be happy to drop the P2, specially that we don't provide documentation for upgrade path from Instant Mantis to regular MantisBT.

yes, I'm thinking about a linux based solution.
The size would depend on what we want the liveCD to contain. For a minimalistic (i.e. no X) system I think we should be around 200Mb, but that's include a full system, not just the LAMP stack.
Of course we can't really compare this to a solution that works on top of a pre-existing operating system, so if size matters, we would need to automate the InstantMantis creation step so we can update it regularly without wasting time.

I've changed the title to reflect the goal which is to provide an Instant Mantis package as part of the daily build. We can re-use the same build script when building a release.

As part of this work, we should choose the best windows environment that we want to package.

Availability of similar Mac option is welcome. My assumption is that Linux users probably don't need such a package.

This sounds quite complicated for those wanting to play around with MantisBT to see if it's right for them. If I was evaluating bug trackers, I would skip over anything that required me to download a CD, burn it, find a spare workstation, restart it, etc. What I would be very interested in is a link on the home page of Mantis to a live demo that you can play with. It doesn't require the user to do anything - just click on through and start mucking around in a sandbox.

IMO we really need to fix the demo site for MantisBT so it isn't using an outdated version 1.1.5 (!!) copy of MantisBT. In fact - I think we need more than one demo site. We really need to demonstrate to users how customisable MantisBT is. So it'd be important to show different workflows in use, show off what some plugins are capable of (SourceIntegration, etc), customised access levels, etc.

Given Microsoft's changes recently [with their "web platform installer" to get php/mysql etc], it doesn't make sense to set up our own method anymore for windows users - so making this as 'no change required'.

That said, we should probably look at generating a MS package installer for their web platform structure (if we meet their requirements)