Yesterday I setup and installed Trac for our development team. Trac is one of those tools that once a developer sees it, they gotta have it. If you haven’t heard of Trac, it allows developers to easily browse Subversion repositories. Subversion is the tool we use to track code changes. Subversion doesn’t have a good web-based GUI for browsing the repository, which is the primary reason we wanted to install Trac. Trac is easy to navigate, provides timelines, and makes browsing differences between revisions easy-easy-easy. The developers at Edgewall really have a winner with this product.
Trac also has a bug ticketing system, wiki, report generation tool, and milestone tracking tools built-in. The other tools need a bit more flushing out, especially the bug-tracker, but the SVN browser makes it worth the trouble to install. The installation process for Trac is…well…tough. I’ve installed hundreds of applications by source and RPM over the years and Trac was definitely one of the hardest I’ve ever encountered. Not only are there a ton of dependencies, but you have to be very careful that you have the right versions of each dependency. Thank goodness Google was able to help quite a bit.
I can see the benefits of Trac already paying off; just this morning, Mike sent me a link to the change-set in Trac for the next upload. Clicking on the link takes me to a web page with a description of the changes, a list of all files that were changed, and a color-coded side-by-side diff for each file….great stuff.
Thanks to Joel, one of our latest hires, for directing us to this application.
