trac?

July 20, 2005 2:33 PM

Is anyone out there using this? How do you like it?
posted by lilboo to computers & internet (5 comments total)

We use trac extensively here at work and all love it. It's great, though I tend to stick to the command line svn tools for log histories and what not. I do love the rss feed of commit messages.
posted by jperkins at 2:52 PM on July 20, 2005

I like it. The wiki integration is brilliant. You can use wiki commands in your SVN checkin notes, and you can refer to checkin notes and whatnot from other pages. I wish all project tools were like that.

The only problem I have is that the administration is difficult, and it is 'not trivial' to set up for multiple projects. (this may have changed in newer versions).
posted by clord at 3:09 PM on July 20, 2005

We really like it a lot for what we use it for, and it's easy on the eyes, but it is missing features that some people would really like (there's no sense of like time estimate/project velocity tracking IIRC). It's general non-super-regimentedness makes it really useable, though, and consequently, more likely to actually get used.
posted by jeb at 4:11 PM on July 20, 2005

It's fuckin' awesome. Makes keeping track of what I'm doing super easy, it's a beautiful front-end for my Subversion repositories (I found Trac when looking for a web frontend shortly after switching to SVN from CVS) and the wiki is a natural place to store things which don't belong in text files or anywhere else, really. (I'm still unsure whether to replace the standard INSTALL/README/etc text files as well, although I never really started using them before either...heh.)

Plus the development community for it is very open, since they use Trac to develop itself, and I am on the mailing list which gets just enough traffic to be interesting but not too much to flood my inbox.

clord, I have it set up for multiple projects (mod_python/Apache2/OSX) and I do not recall it being terrifically difficult. However, one of my main hobbies is futzing with Unix, so it may not have been super easy and I just considered that par for the course (e.g. I wanted something non-standard and was prepared to spend a half hour tinkering).

Also to respond to your administration question, what specifically do you find hard to admin? I admit the trac-admin CLI tool isn't exactly quick but once you learn the few basic commands it's easy to use and/or script. And I've figured out that overriding the few things trac-admin doesn't handle, and setting up better defaults for any new projects, is easily done by editing a single file in the Trac source code (and you don't really need to know Python to edit said file either, as it's just a big-ass database representation).

jeb, I am fairly sure that the very issue of time estimation/time tracking is in either 0.9 or 1.0 and I've seen it discussed a bit on the mailing list recently...if you haven't already, check the wiki/tickets to find the specifics as I don't recall.
posted by cyrusdogstar at 6:01 PM on July 20, 2005

If you're using CVS, there's also the original project that Trac was based on called CVStrac. It's much more spartan, which I actually prefer.
posted by bbrown at 4:45 AM on July 21, 2005