Trac
| August 2, 2006 @ 11:35 am | Filed under Software |
I have recently installed Trac on the server here in the ECLab at Brigham Young University. I must say that I am converted. Trac is exactly what I was looking for. Trac is an online project management tool. It contains a wiki, a bug tracking system and a source browser. This was the kind of tool I was looking for. It allows me to post information about my thesis, keep track of bugs and other improvements I need to make to my code, it allows me to browse my source code, etc..
I love the source code browser. Trac allows you to hook your Subversion repository into the environment and then from there you can browse all the source in the repository. Not only that, there is a Subversion hook you can use that allows you to reference bugs in your commit messages. The hook looks at the message and determines what was done regarding the bug(s) mentioned in the message.
For our projects in the ECLab, Phil Windley has been paying for Basecamp account. Basecamp was nice but it didn’t provide a way for me to hook into my Subversion repository. Now I have everything I used in Basecamp plus some. If you are looking for a project management system I would recommend Trac for now.
We are currently moving all the project information from Basecamp to Trac. Another nice thing about Trac is that it is easy to set up. The actual Trac install can be a beast depending on your server setup but I didn’t find it all that bad, there were plenty of online resources. Once Trac is installed you use the trac-admin command to create new environments. Each environment is independent of each other in the sense that each environment knows nothing about the other environments. However, global changes are made easily because they all rely on the main Trac install. Best of all, they keep it simple and try to keep things to just the essentials. Here is what their website says about that:
Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission; to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team’s established development process and policies.
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