I'm a bit sad that this discussion turned so quickly into a shootout,
even though it started so well.

> You simply cannot solve a problem 
> of any signifficant proportions without changing large amounts of the 
> existing codebase.

Sure, you change large portions of the existing code, but you do it
*incrementally*, in the open, and taking feedback from the existing
community into account. You may want to read the following article and
its references, which describes the situation quite well:

http://darkforge.blogspot.com/2010/02/code-bomb-or-newbie-with-big-ideas.html

For me, this means:

 - A big, monolithic rewrite gets a -1.
 - Infrastructure changes that don't bring a concrete advantage to
either the users, administrators or plugins developers get a -1.

> A key benefit of moving to a relational model, is that we attract a much
> wider audience, and thus get more help.

I doubt this. Just having a normalized database won't magically attract
flocks of new, motivated developers.

> This happens because people like
> Josh and myself and doubtless many others, can eventually reccommend the 
> product for use in production environments, without a major up-front
> (re)development cost.

You may be surprised to learn that people didn't wait for that change to
put Trac into production environments. As a starting point, see:

  http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracUsers

Although I wouldn't suggest forking as readily as Noah, I agree with him
that we have seen too much hand-waving and too little concrete
argumentation until now.

-- Remy

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