I've been using Subversion and
Trac for some years now, and I have encouraged
its use at work since the last couple of years, with the undesired effect of
having to maintain four different Trac installations with different database
systems (SQLite3 and PostgreSQL), plugins (more than 15 on the big
servers), authentication systems (htpass files, LDAP and a database based
system) and tons of projects published (two internal servers have 64 and 16
projects, one of the client system has 33 projects and there is only one
single project installation, but it is living at a client's system).
Yesterday night, while reading Planet Debian I found a post from John Goerzen about tools to replace Trac, including the option to use Git as the project VCS.
In the post he talks about different options, mainly projects that I would
categorize as issue tracking systems (mantis, roundup, etc.), but it
also talks about Redmine, a project management
system implemented using the Ruby on Rails
framework that is similar to Trac.
As it looked interesting I downloaded, installed and executed an instance in about 15 minutes (I love the systems that support sqlite3 for this quick tests, not having to touch real database servers speeds up simple tests a lot).
I played a little bit with the system and I believe that I will spend some
more time testing it at work next week, as it looks quite promising; the
standard version has almost all the features I'm interested in without the
need to install additional plugins and it can do most of the things I was
missing from Trac to do lightweight project management.
I evaluated ]project-open[ to use it together with
Trac for our internal project management tasks, mainly because we miss
important features from Trac, like having clean systems to view the tasks of
a user in all projects or a clean way to do the project planning using
tickets and gantt charts. Of course there are ways to do it, but the
plugins I've tried are not as good and simple as I would like.
The problem with the use of ]project-open[ is that I don't really like it
for us, as it has tons of features that I feel we don't need nor will use and,
on a first try, the system seemed difficult to deploy and maintain, probably
because my lack of knowledge about OpenACS and
TCL.
In fact we still don't have ]po[ running at work because I was unable to to
integrate the authentication system with our LDAP server on my first tries
and have had no time to investigate further since then.
The good thing about trying Redmine is that if we don't end up using it at
least I can take the most of this opportunity by looking at Ruby on Rails
and the Ruby Programming Language, at least
from the administration side, as I have never looked at it seriously.
