Hi everyone,
I would like to propose that Apache Bloodhound should migrate away from
Trac as a base and instead use the Django web framework.
Some of the advantages we would gain from such a move include:
* Django supports Python 3 (as I understand it from version 2.0, Python
2 support is dropped)
* Django is popular enough that it should be considered a good
transferable skill for our contributors
* Similarly it may be that potential contributors with Django
experience may be attracted to this project
Other benefits we will have is that we will gain better control over the
basic data model rather than having to do any monkey patching or sql
translation.
My proposal as it is does not intend to go any further than settle the
question of our desire to change from Trac to Django but there are
decisions around some of the practicalities that are worth considering.
Given previous discussions, I suspect that we have enough support for
some kind of migration to Django as a base for the project. As far as I
am concerned there is nothing in previous discussions during the setup
of the Apache Bloodhound project that ties the community to Trac as a
base. Our only real commitment regarding our dealing with Trac was that
we would not encourage any kind of fork. Please do put me right if
anyone feels I am misrepresenting the situation of course.
There are still a range of ways that we could implement such a migration
to Django, from starting from scratch to attempting to match the
interfaces provided by Trac so as to limit changes to code that sits on
top of it.
The latter extreme does still feel a bit too much like forking Trac for
my liking so I think we need to be careful if something like that is
seen as best.
To start from scratch will leave us with plenty to do but I am hoping
that we will find ways to integrate other external projects to provide
features, either through Django apps and middleware or beyond.
Regardless of other decisions, the scope of the project should remain
broadly the same, so we would be aiming to have reasonable feature
parity including, amongst other stuff:
* Multi tracker support (multi-product)
* Integrated wiki
* Fast search plugin
* SCM integration
We will obviously also need to ensure that we can migrate from a
bloodhound based on Trac to any new version.
I look forward to hearing thoughts around this.
Cheers,
Gary
