I love Trac

After searching high & low for a bug tracker to use, I have finally settled into Trac, but only recently I have had the time to really take a deep look at it. The #1 issue with Trac is that it is hard to setup for the first time. I am used to web applications that are either drop in (ScrewTurn Wiki) or Drop In, mess with config, done (just about anything else). Trac has a very different approach, in which most of the management of the project is done via a command line tool. It took me a while to grasp that, and then it was a lot easier.  (Yes, I know about web admin).

The #2 issue with Trac is the version number, it is currently 0.10.2, for a product that is feature rich and stable enough to call 1.0. I am used to OSS projects have ridiciously low version numbers, so it is not surprising, but I do believe that this would be a turnoff for many people. I believe that the low version number is because they are making breaking changes to the code base fairly often.

So far I have been very impressed with the amount of stuff I can do it. It is highly customizable via configuration, and there are all sort of really interesting plugins that exists for it. Gantt chart and export as PDF are the ones that are really cool. But there are others that seem to fit just about any concatenation of features that I can think of.

Print | posted on Saturday, November 25, 2006 6:22 AM

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#  11/25/2006 11:52 AM Jason Finch

Trac is great. We also searched around when looking for bug trackers. It was a contest between Fogcreek Bugz, Jira and Trac. While money debates raged on the setup and use of trac grew, and eventually the other two trackers just dropped off the consideration list. We are now heavy users of the system. The massive amount of plugins means you usually find something that you were after not found in the core package.

I do think Trac would have a bigger windows audience if they could wrap all the dependencies etc into a MSI installer. So out of the box you get your apache/Trac/python/etc in a ready to run fashion. Actually I have heard of some pre-configured Vmware virtual appliance images available that give you this, full SVN/Trac all integrated together..


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#  11/26/2006 9:23 AM Nik Hatcher

We are searching for some team collaboration tool now and currently we are choosing between Trac and Clarity from Korzh.com which is a little similar to Jira (Java based too). It is not so functional as Trac yet but has more clear UI and looks very promising.


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#  11/26/2006 12:39 PM Luis Sanchez

Some of the best Trac VMWare Appliances are available at:

<ul>
<li><a href="http://buildix.thoughtworks.com" target="_blank">http://buildix.thoughtworks.com</a></li>
<li><a href="http://fortybeans.wishconsultants.co.uk/index.php?itemid=5" target="_blank">http://fortybeans.wishconsultants.co.uk/index.php?itemid=5</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/377" target="_blank">http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/377</a></li>
</ul>


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#  11/28/2006 9:53 PM Tanner Burson

If you're playing with trac and .NET development, I've written a small howto, on a plugin I hacked to allow CCNet integration with trac. It's far from perfect, but for our use it's great!
http://www.tannerburson.com/blog/articles/2006/11/06/cruisecontrol-net-and-trac

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