| I finished installed Trac last Friday. This was my second attempt on two different systems (SUSE then finally Ubuntu). The first attempt ended in nothing but cursing. I really don't think the installation process is very smooth. There's so much that manually needs to be done. Couple that with incomprehensible error messages, and it's just not a fun thing to do. Here are my thoughts going through the install 1) Why doesn't the installer ask you for an install path and create the Trac Environments Directory for you? Setting the permissions should be done automatic, too. 2) Installing Subversion on just about any modern distro will automatically create the needed config file to interact with Apache. (dav_svn.conf on Ubuntu). Shouldn't Trac automatically create one, too? 3) After I install Trac I then have to to run 'trac-admin' to create a new project and change its ownership to Apache. I would like to see the installation do this, too. I've just installed the software. Of course I want to setup a new project. 4) I created my project, did everything exactly as the install guide said, and was finally presented with the "Login authentication fails w/ AssertionError: Authentication information not available." error when I tried to login. I googled and found that this is actually a closed bug in Trac (#2258). The bug was marked invalid because "it just means you haven't configured authentication with your web server." But to me this is a bug with the installer. If authentication is required, why doesn't the install configure it for me? I had to add the following code to my trac config before something --- even as basic as logging in -- could work: <Location "/trac.cgi/login"> AuthType Basic AuthName "Trac" AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd Require valid-user </Location> To me at least, that was anything but trivial. It took a question to this mailing list and some messing around to get it to work. Things are running very smooth now that everything is installed. I was thinking about shutting up and just using this great project. But I hope my criticism will help improve this project. I know it's not yet at 1.0, so please take this all with a grain of salt. I would just hope that anything required to get Trac (fully) running would be setup during the installation process. If there is nobody working on improving the installer, I would be willing to help. This is the first impression an Admin (or user) will get with this product. I would love to see it be a painless one. -Sean |
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