From: Jason Roelofs <jameskilton@...>
Date: 2008-04-04T20:40:40+09:00
Subject: Re: issue tracking (Re: [ANN] RCRchive shutting down)

Coming to Trac's defense:

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 6:14 AM, Michal Suchanek <hramrach@centrum.cz> wrote:
>
> On 04/04/2008, mathew <meta@pobox.com> wrote:
>  > Can I ask the Trac naysayers what's wrong with it?
>  >
>  >  (Just for my personal edification, as I've not noticed any problems yet, no
>  > need to copy the list.)
>  >
>
>  I have seen a few instances of Trac, and they are all very annoying.
>
>  - There is no way to register. In one case the registration is
>  site-wide, in other cases there were registered users but no way to
>  register.

The default way for Trac to authenticate people is through Basic Auth.
Obviously this isn't good for public projects, but there is a plugin
for allowing registration that many trac sites use (see:
dev.rubyonrails.org, rubyeventmachine.com).

>
>  - There is no navigation. You cannot go from report to submit or from
>  one kind of report to another.
>

There isn't "no" navigation, but yea there isn't an easy way to
navigate sub-sections (tickets, reports are the worst).

>  - There is no apparent search. I haven't tried custom reports but as I
>  cannot register it would be probably quite hard to use that feature.
>

There's plenty of search capabilities built into trac, including an
entire custom search builder for tickets that's quite powerful.

>  - There is no email notification so you have no idea what's going on
>  in there. It is probably because of the lack of registration - the one
>  for which I am registered sends mail, at least to me.

You can configure trac to send email, but it needs to *know* your
email. If you have permission on that given trac site, you can add
yourself as a CC to a ticket and you will get emails.

>
>  It might be that all these can be fixed with template tuning and
>  plugins or the like.
>
>  However, it looks like the default templates are very poor, and it's
>  hard to get registration working - it's probably not part of the
>  default installation or requires additional tools or something.

I find the default templates perfectly usable. Extending / changing
isn't the easiest thing, but there are places to do it cleanly.


Trac is a very good ticket management system. The default install is
kind of lacking but it is in no way unusable, and there are tons of
plugins that add all sorts of functionality. As most of your
"complaints" really are because you couldn't even try out the site,
I'd have to ask that you refrain from comments until you really know
what's available and whats not.

Rails has been using Trac for some time and it seems to be working
quite well. As Trac really was (as far as I can tell) the first of
it's kind to be widely adopted, there are going to be some
deficiencies that appear over time, and thankfully we now have
alternatives.

In my preliminary look at RedMine, I'd change the source browser to
work like Trac's, in that it's not Ajax folder searching, and clicking
on a file shows you the file contents, not the revision history.

Jason R.