On Trac(k)!

One of my most favorite tools in my work environment is Trac. Trac, for what it does, is truly amazing. I haven't found a better tool out there that manages issues/tickets, the source code repository, provides a project roadmap and is extremely extensible. Oh, and by the way, it's FREE!!!

I've been using this tool for over a year to help organize information within my team. In all honesty, without Trac (along with its Subversion integration), we'd be completely and utterly sunk. I find this tool so refreshing because it's easy, fast, efficient, customizable, integrable and again, FREE! Not only that, but there's a very large support community available as well as a development community focused around generating great plug-ins for the product (also free).

So, today, with great surprise, I found out that the folks behind Trac released their latest stable "major" feature release. Admittedly, it took some time to upgrade the environment due to the changes necessary for the plugins that we already have. However, when the smoke cleared, it turns out that the system is actually easier to manage and has a lot of great new features, including the ability to install practically everything via easy_install.

For me, easy_install is a bit of a departure from normal Windows installers. I'm very used to downloading what I need, then running an install package to get it running. Compared to that experience, easy_install is amazing. For most products, you simply have to call "easy_install " from the command line (once you have easy_install and its prerequisites installed) and it does the rest. Period. No downloading of packages, no installers. Easy_install downloads the product, compiles, and installs the component, AND it checks for dependencies as well. This came in very handy when installing all the packages I needed to replace the plugins that needed to be upgraded for the new version.

Anyway, on to Trac 0.11 for us. I'm already impressed with the default inclusion of the webadmin module, as well as the improvements to the repository browser. (Sigh), if only we kept actual dev code in here, we'd have instant visual "blame"/"praise" support.
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I am eagerly looking forward to customizing the ticket workflow. This, more than anything else, will be a great benefit to our team.

Trac Team: My hat is off to you. You make a great product and you've proven that your system is competitive (and many times surpasses) very expensive commercial systems.