Redmine

After much Googling and hair pulling and futzing around with various servers and commands to get things to work, finally got Redmine going some time last night. I settled for running it on Thin in a command line for now, just to get my feet wet and see if it can do all the things I want to do, then I'll finish figuring out how to configure it to run in a production environment. So far, so good, mostly.

I have one thing that I spend a lot of time doing. I typically receive log files of issues in a text format, and I'll need to read over that log and figure out the highlights, for example to call out the point at which an issue occurred. I'll also jot down some notes on what happened where, and what should have happened if it didn't, so that when I go to make the software change (sometimes days or weeks after the log is taken/annotated), I can refer back to the notes to refresh my memory.

What I've done so far in my test setup of Redmine is to copy a chunk of the attachment, quote it, and then post my notes into a new comment on the issue page.

Log file line 1
Log file line 2
Log file line 3

Something bad happened here and I don't know why

Log file line 4
Log file line 5

Oh, right, that's why. It's supposed to do this, this, and that.

This works in a pinch, and is better than my old system (which was basically no system - probably better off leaving dead trees all over the place).

What I'd really like to do is have a way to annotate the text file inline, so that I can comment directly on someone's attachment and have the whole log (for context's sake) and my notes in one place. Lines with comments would be highlighted in some way, pointing to the notes off to the side.

Log file line 1
Log file line 2
Log file line 3 <------------------- Something bad happened here and I don't know why
Log file line 4
Log file line 5 <------------------- Oh, right, that's why. It's supposed to do this, this, and that.

Is this doable, already done in some way, or am I missing an even better way to go about what I want to do?