Hello,

considering all the plugins that try to hide, extend, modify or play 
with the custom properties of a ticket, and also reading through the 
resent discussion about the trac core I have a simple question to 
understand a design decision.
If I remember correctly trac started with only one ticket type. later 
this was extended to distinguish between all different types with all 
the helper plugins showing up to manage the custom fields. While ticket 
types are a good idea, I find it rather interesting, that I have to hide 
fields in order to get other, completely unrelated types. Why don't you 
expose a real basic API to construct different tickets types where every 
type will have to add fileds in order to be useful. The Ticketing system 
itself would be one of the users of this API, adding the current set of 
fields. If this is a performance issue [1], why not having different 
tables for every different configured ticket type. You could reuse the 
current ticket page UI as a generic UI for every ticket type, but 
different plugins could override these with a different custom UI. The 
only problem with this approach is, that you can not change from one 
type to another. The ticketing system may still have a custom field 
"type" to distinguish between a bug and an enhancement. But other types, 
like requirements, tasks, tests, inventory and so on are generally not 
changed from on type into another. In these rare cases, one could still 
simply refer/reference to a new ticket of different type. I can't see a 
reason, why I should change unrelated types, esp. since we have the 
workflow.

The ticket numbering is the same as the subversion revision. It is a 
number nothing else and it should be unique between all ticket types 
simply for the ease of use.

 From what I can see, and also use in my setup, trac is exetended in 
many ways to include completely different types in one setup, and the 
common sence for all types in my setup is, that the have a number, a 
subject a description, the time/author fields and history of changes. 
Nothing else. Every other field, like resolution, severity, version 
milestone and so on is specific to one of multiple types.

I'm not a real python / trac developer. I'm simply trying to fit trac 
into our process and I often come across this question. If you think 
about core features of trac, make the ability to manage types and 
tickets, crossreferencing between tickets (e.g duplicates, and 
references), workflows and permissions the core feature. The ticketing 
itself is already a module build upon the core.

There are a lot of discussions about new fields. In this minimalistic 
approach, trac does not enforce a set of fields, even not the so called 
standard fields. It will mange as many fileds the user will configure.

Sorry if this is already common sence between the developers. I did not 
follow every discussion on the list due to lack of time, but I was 
thinking about a new ticket type today, and hit that "hide" fields issue 
again.

Best regards
Dirk

[1] I can remember a previous discussion, about the database design for 
custom ticket fields and performance issues.

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