On 14 Jun 2008, at 20:32, Eric Allen wrote:

> How about redmine? My company is in the process of moving from Trac  
> to redmine, and it's open-source Ruby on Rails, so it's easy to hack  
> on.

On 14 Jun 2008, at 19:26, Thomas Nichols wrote:

> I'll second that (moderate) concern. Sure, Lighthouse is what the cool
> kids are doing, and it's a great app,  but I'm really not sure what it
> wins you over, say, [Retrospectiva][] -- which you can host  
> yourself, is
> OSS, and doesn't lock all your tickets away in a proprietary silo.
>
> Actually, personally I'd prefer [ditz][], but I'm almost certainly  
> in a
> minority on that one ;-)
>
> -- Thomas.
>
> [Retrospectiva]: http://retrospectiva.org/
> [ditz]: http://ditz.rubyforge.org/ditz/
>
>
> Luis Villa wrote on 2008/06/14 18:26:
>> This is probably my cue to bemoan the move from an admittedly
>> less-than-optimal free software solution (trac) to a closed-source
>> solution (lighthouse.) Feel free to ignore me, of course, but I do
>> think it is a shame. :/

OK, I should probably explain my thinking about this.

1. As Tracks has grown a truly wonderful community, I've felt a  
responsibility to make sure that all of the resources are in the hands  
of the community, rather than in mine alone. That way, if I  
disappeared without warning one day, other people could pick up the  
reins and it would carry on as before. Not that I'm planning on  
disappearing, but you never know when you might be squashed by a  
bus ;-). That was part of the motivation for moving to GitHub: it's  
hosted by a third party, but also, the distributed nature of git means  
that everyone who forks or clones the repository has a copy of the  
entire repository and its history. So everyone holds the source and  
the history of the project, unlike checking out a subversion  
repository. So it was the hosted nature of Lighthouse that appealed to  
me, even though it is closed.

2. I have gradually diminishing amounts of time to commit to Tracks,  
as will have been clear from my infrequent svn commits, and the  
decreasing rate of posting on my blog. Trac is a bit of a beast to  
administer, and I'd much rather spend my limited time actually writing  
code for Tracks rather than up to my elbows in trac-admin. I just want  
something that works, rather than having to spend a lot of time  
hacking something else or doing admin.

3. I want to make the barriers to contributing to Tracks much lower.  
Again, that was behind the wish to move to GitHub, because forking,  
merging and patching is so easy. After I got loads of Trac spam and  
had to lock things down a bit, I have to manually add named accounts  
(which is a real chore), so it is restricted to frequent contributors  
and committers (same with svn commit permissions). Everyone else has  
to submit tickets as 'guest', which is awkward and doesn't let people  
take ownership of their own tickets. Lighthouse would allow that, as  
well as giving other convenient ways of interacting with tickets (by  
email, for e.g.). And it interfaces nicely with GitHub

Having said all that, I'm in no way set on using Lighthouse at all  
costs, particularly if people in the community have reservations. If  
no-one is objecting to GitHub, I'll go ahead and move the repository,  
but leave moving from Trac for now. I'll look into Retrospectiva,  
Redmine and even ditz :-) and see if that would ease the admin burden  
and make it easier for people to create tickets.

cheers,
bsag

-- 
but she's a girl - the weblog of a female geek
http://www.rousette.org.uk
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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