Ok, time to throw in my two cents. I introduced Trac to my company last fall. One of the main reasons for going with Trac was the active and dynamic development community, and the development philosophy. However, after following the development and interacting with the community, I am a bit disappointed.
> In the meantime we will continue to do our best building a solution that > everyone can use and that fits our mission statement. From the Trac webpage: "The mission of the project is to develop and improve the Trac program as a collaborative effort in a bazaar-type project environment." And it has a great link to "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". Read it. Read it again. Then change the way you work or change your mission statement (I'm hoping for the first solution). Trac has a large userbase of which most are developers. There are plenty of users willing to chip in and help take Trac to the next level. Just look at the number of plugins. Just look at the number of patches attached to various tickets. Unfortunately, most of these eager users are ignored. Example: Just two weeks ago, Jeff Hammel asked about including AutoQueryPlugin into the core, and he listed excellent reasons why it should be included (I agree with all of them). Nobody answered his e-mail. Example: I wrote a patch for subcomponents since our company need this. It was ignored, both the ticket and an e-mail. I started asking around on IRC and was told it was clean, but way too large to include in the core so I should make a plugin. It took me a couple of evenings to implement, and 90% of the time was spent trying to understand the Trac codebase so I was suprised when told it was too big (btw, "very high quality code" should be easy to read and understand - I think Trac still has some potential in that respect). Well, I wrote the plugin, but it was not a pleasant experience. It was much harder to write, uglier, required a plethora of hacks due to shortcomings in the plug-in API, but I managed. I figured I would wait until 0.11 was released in case last minute changes affected my plugin. I've been waiting since December. If I had gotten at least some feedback (even "your code sucks, clean it up"), you would have seen many more patches from me. Suggestions: - Live up to your mission statement. Do it the Bazaar way (see book for details) - Spend a bit less time on development and a bit more time at looking at other peoples patches that could be included. If you do, Trac will move forward at a much higher pace. Users will be encouraged and more people will join and write patches to include. Add functionality in baby steps. Some crappy support is better than zip, zilch, nothing. Users can give feedback (even in the form of patches) as you go along steering you towards a better product. Nobody (maybe except a handful in the world) are able to design and write the perfect system without a couple of iterations. Everything can be rewritten (with a proper testsystem, without fear), and database tables can be altered anyway you like during an upgrade. There is a reason why so many "other FOSS projects" work this way. It is more efficient. It is the Bazaar way. Happy hacking. Best regard, - Endre Disclaimer: I just watched Linus do a Google talk on git, so my statements are probably both bolder and harsher than they normally would be. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
