On Oct 7, 2008, at 12:37 PM, Stedwick wrote: > > This is going to sound like a rather vague question, but how is trac > SUPPOSED to be used? > > The reason I ask is because we use trac at my company, but we are > thinking of switching to something else. Nobody at my company seems to > like it. I just came on board a month ago, and I've never used trac, > and it's kind of been placed upon me to research alternatives, but I > figure that trac is used everywhere so it's got to be good and we are > probably just using it wrong. > > However, a month has gone by, and I really can't figure trac out. It > doesn't seem to work, or do anything at all, for that matter. I'm kind > of stymied. I've heard this from other people as well; trac is just > baffling and weird. I think I've read that track is supposed to "adapt > to YOUR workflow, and work the way YOU want it to", but it seems to me > that it has no workflow at all.
This is correct, one of the central design tenets of Trac is that it enforces as little process on you as possible. This does seem to backfire sometimes, as there is a large segment of the userbase that would like more structure than that. If you have a suggestion on how to resolve this, please let us know, it is frequently debated but people rarely seem to come up with anything solid. > > For example, my boss recently asked me what changes were going to be > moved into the trunk since the last merge two weeks ago, and I thought > to myself, "Oh, I'll just do a search for all the bugs that I fixed in > the past two weeks," but, amazingly, I CAN'T DO THAT. Even using > "custom query" there is no field that allows you to query based on > time. And I certainly don't want to start writing SQL. > Time-based queries were indeed one of the major deficienes of the query system vs. reports. I believe this feature has been checked in to trunk, and so will be part of 0.12 when it is released. In the mean time, yes you have to write SQL. The query system is no where near a full replacement for reports, which is why despite their ugliness reports have not been removed yet. > I read over the documentation, and it does a good job of explaining > WHAT things do, but I can't find anywhere that explains what it was > DESIGNED to do. How were tickets DESIGNED to be used, if they weren't > designed to be used based on date? To me, the date seems the most > obvious thing to track bugs by, other than perhaps by severity. The > date reported, the date fixed, the date released. > > I'm wondering if it's a philosophical conflict. The people at my > company (myself included) like opinionated software. It's like iTunes. > Everybody hates iTunes because they can't manage their music in their > own unbelievably specific manner. However, if you use iTunes as it was > DESIGNED to be used, you will discover that it's an amazing, excellent > piece of software. I can't imagine managing my music any other way. It > just works so well. You just have to get by the fact that you have to > do things "the Apple way". Believe it or not, the Apple way is usually > pretty good. > > I'm concerned that the trac way is... well, I don't think it even has > a way. Does it? I can go to the subversion documentation, or the git > documentation, and it will tell me EXACTLY how I'm supposed to manage > my source code, how my teams are supposed to work together, how > merging is supposed to work, what the workflow is, et cetera. There > are a couple of options of course, but at least they are well > documented options. > > Anyway, sorry for the strange question. Can anybody explain to me how > a usual "trac workflow" is supposed to look? Or a good website that > goes over how people generally use trac? You can look at the TracUsers page to see other people using Trac. Some major places I know you can look include Trac itself, dev.laptop.org, developer.pidgin.im, trac.adiumx.com. Beyond that you will need to sit down and figure out what works best for you and your team. --Noah --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac Users" group. To post to this group, send email to trac-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/trac-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
