[GMG-Devel] redmine vs. trac

[will kahn-greene]

Hi!

One of the things I worked on this week was moving us from the Foocorp 
Redmine issue tracker to something on our own server.  I was originally 
planning to install Redmine on our own server, then transfer the data.

Yesterday, I spent a large chunk of the day working on installing 
Redmine.  There are a series of problems, the biggest of which is that I 
have no familiarity with Rails, so there's a lot of stuff to come up to 
speed on.  It's going to take me a lot longer to get it up and running 
than I thought it was going to.  I'm also not enthused about a project 
infrastructure where each piece is written in a different language with 
a different architecture.

Even after I get it running, someone has to continue to maintain it 
going forward.  That got me thinking about switching back to Trac.

Trac and Redmine are pretty similar and differ in two ways that I think 
affect us:

1. Trac is written in Python; Redmine is written in Ruby on Rails

2. Trac has a built-in keywords field; Redmine has no tags/keywords 
field, but there are two tagging plugins that add functionality


I've installed Trac, maintained it over time, and written plugins for it 
for a few projects I've worked on in the past.  That was all with older 
versions of Trac than what's current.


Isn't migrating from Redmine to Redmine easier?

No.  If we were definitely running the same versions of everything as 
Foocorp, then that reduces the problems.  However, I'm pretty sure we're 
not doing that and Foocorp has multiple projects in their Redmine 
instance, so there are a handful of complexities and migrating the data 
is not a no-op.


Didn't you say you hated Trac?

In the past I've expressed ick feelings about Trac (and Redmine, too), 
but the last couple of months lead me to believe that this style of 
issue tracker fits this group best.  I think that's really important. 
Further, I think this community will be much better at bug triage than 
other projects I've used Trac on and that alleviates the bulk of my 
problems with Trac.  Also, it's been a couple of years since I used Trac 
and it looks like they've improved some things since then.


Summary:

I would like to switch to Trac.  It will be a lot easier to install and 
maintain for me and it has tags/keywords built-in which I think is 
important for this project.

Is anyone against that?  If so, then we should discuss it.

If not, then I'll plan to use Trac and do the install and migration next 
week.

/will