Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Sergey A. Lipnevich" <sergey AT sourcemage.org>]

Andraž "ruskie" Levstik wrote:
> All of that can be done using third party tools...
> Don't need trac for it.
> There's scmbug that ties in scm's with bug tracking systems,
>
> And we wanted to put all the docs into a single place but ppl among them 
> myself
>
> want a proper wiki...
>
> And there's really nething to integarate... 
>   

"Nothing to integrate" flies in the face of all that work done by fine
people assembling the stuff together, so I beg to differ.

Speaking of Trac, the beauty of it is that it's really thought through
in terms of power and ability to get out of the way quickly. Let me give
you a few examples. Let's say you're a section maintainer who's only
interested in your own section. With Trac, you can subscribe to an RSS
feed for any sub-tree of the repository, and your wish comes true. You
can link a commit with a ticket (or close it, BTW) with zero effort
using Trac links in log messages. Everything, including tickets and
commit messages, is a wiki, so you can hyper-link without ugly long
URLs. ChangeLog-style output can be generated for every sub-tree of the
repository, and every revision range. Every commit message, wiki page,
and ticket submission, is indexed and searchable. Even if all former
things didn't impress you, the latter must: with a bunch of 3rd party
tools, it's difficult to provide a convenient search capability across
all of them. Plug-ins are available or being written for things like
distributed builds, configurable ticket workflow, Web-based
administration, SCMs other than Subversion, etc.; Trac is rapidly
becoming very popular among F/OSS crowd.

Having said that, I'm not sure if Trac is good for Linux
distribution-style development as opposed to a single package, and there
are weaknesses in each separate Trac module (Wiki, query, ticket
tracker, etc. may not be as full-featured as their stand-alone
competitors), so please don't consider the ode above as a suggestion to
drop everything else and switch. I felt like putting my favorite
distributed software development tool in the spot-light :-).

Best,

Sergey.