[Chicago] Trac?

[Peter Fein]

On Thursday 28 September 2006 12:17, Ted Pollari wrote:
> So is anyone using Trac?  Even better, does anyone have any longer
> term experience with the project?
>
> The research group I'm involved with is looking to possibly shift
> some functionality over to a Trac instance, probably in applications
> that the Trac folks never specifically thought of, but that's kinda
> what we do in my group =)
>
> Any thoughts?

We've been using it for our inhouse development for almost 2 years (since 0.8, 
IIRC) and are *very* happy.  The subversion integration is excellent, esp. 
when using a post-commit hook to comment/close tickets from svn log messages.
Customization in the 0.9 series is a lot better - it's pretty easy to 
add/remove fields to fit your group's working methodology.  The reporting 
system is pretty nice too.  Built-in syntax highlighting's nice too.  If 
you're using the SQLite backend, back up is almost trivial (and worth doing, 
since you'll soon find that all of your non-source-code IP is in your 
tickets/wiki).

That's not to say it's not without it's flaws - if you drop your net 
connection in the middle of a submit, you can lose your changes, but that's 
more the browser's fault.  The wiki markup language is a little awkward 
sometimes - list formatting is less-than-stellar, and the auto-wikification 
of CamelCase words tends to catch references to class names.  One of my dev's 
prefers wikipedia-style markup generally, though I personally don't care 
much.  There's no real support for blocking tickets on each other.

It's a lot less featureful than Bugzilla in some ways, but hey, that's a good 
thing. ;)  Oh, and it's python.

I <3 Trac.

--Pete

-- 
Peter Fein                                                     pfein at pobox.com
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