On May 31, 2008, at 9:23 AM, Jonas Borgström wrote: > > krkempa wrote: >> Noah's wrote: >>> That kind of huge collection of features might >>> be good for boxing up and shipping to people that want a turnkey >>> solution, but they aren't much use in the Trac community >> >> So anyone who want to have usable Trac flavour needs to make his hand >> dirty and be ready for using hacks everywhere... Noah's statement is >> one of the most ridiculous I've ever read. > > Even if we doubled the trac-core code base by including the 10 or so > most popular plugins chances are good that you would be able to find > other plugins that would make Trac more usable for you. > > There is no magic set of plugins that would make Trac perfect for > everyone and all the different ways Trac is used. > > For this issue with dynamic variables for reports I think it has a > good > chance of making it into trac core. But starting with a plugin based > implementation is probably a good approach both since it will solve > the > reporters immediate problem and also give it a chance to "prove > itself" > before inclusion.
Also a good point, there are certainly plugins that reach a point where they are both widely used and they are "stable", meaning the problem space has bee worked out well and the solution chosen by the plugin does what it needs to. These plugins are great candidates for core inclusion (WebAdmin, TicketDelete, parts of AccountManager, etc etc). To answer the issue with API breakage and lack of maintainers: 1) Trac is pre-1.0. We take this somewhat seriously as meaning that we still reserve the right to break APIs as needed. We do try to keep backwards compatibility for at least one major version, but this is not always possible. If you want to wait for Trac 1.0, any plugin written for that should work for a very very long time. This is up to you. Compared to many other projects in the same area (bugzilla, jira, roundup) Trac is still very young. There are many parts of it that the dev team knows are poorly done, just takes time to fix. Also just for the record, if you install both ClearSilver and the old WebAdmin, a very large number of 0.10 plugins will run on 0.11 without modification. 2) People not maintaing plugins is a hard problem, but one I think is out of scope for the Trac core project. Having better community rating and feedback systems on trac-hacks would at least give some indication as to if a hack contributor is likely to vanish, but even this is not perfect. Saying it should be in core, so you don't run the risk of the maintain vanishing is also foolish, as we do have core devs phase in and out of activity a good bit too. The best way I know of to help with this issue is to roll up your sleeves and help, submit patches when things are broken. If you find a plugin on trac-hacks that looks abandoned, try contacting the author, if they are okay with it (or if they have vanished), Alec or I can transfer ownership of plugins on trac-hacks so new people can take over. I am all ears if people have suggestions for community management too. --Noah --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac Development" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/trac-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
