Project hosting thoughts

[Matthew Gillen]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> Trac software has been around for a while, and I've stumbled across a few 
> projects using it.  Reading up on their website http://trac.edgewall.org/ the 
> trac feature list looked pretty neat.

It may take a bit of customization and tweaking (ie installing some plugins)
before it does everything you want, but its worth it, IMHO.

You mentioned most of the things that make Trac nice, so I'll just add one
of the biggies for me: they have a post-commit hook you can use with your
subversion repo to update ticket status with an svn commit log message, like
this:
  svn ci -m "did blah, closes #2"

Log messages can also use wiki markup to refer to other changesets, tickets,
wiki pages, etc, and when you look at the log messages in the timeline or
browser they are interpreted correctly (ie as wiki-links).

A potential drawback is that the subversion repo must be on a filesystem
accessable to the web server hosting Trac (note it *can* be NFS mounted as
long as the fsfs svn backend is used).

I don't know if that's really an issue with the current infrastructure
layout, but even if people aren't comfortable with the master repo server
also having a web-server, the latest subversion (1.4) has a sync feature
that could be used to keep a copy of the master repo on the Trac/web-server box.

HTH,
Matt