Windows Developer Power Tools

14.4 Managing a Project with Trac

Tracking issues is critical to a project’s health. BugTracker.NET, Bugzilla, and CodeTrack all offer many important capabilities, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to tie the great communication benefits of a Wiki into a full-featured issue-tracking system? Trac, a Python-based issue-tracking system and enhanced Wiki, lets you do just that. As Trac’s overview page says, it creates “a network of links between issues/bugs/tasks, code changes and Wiki text.” This enables developers, customers, and management to quickly see the big-picture status of a project.

What about somehow linking to your source-control repository so you can reference the actual code in your issue-resolution conversations? Trac ties directly to Subversion repositories, so you can tie revisions to the source code straight into comment streams on Trac’s Wiki, or have issue tickets show the exact differences in a revision used to resolve an issue.

Trac at a Glance
Tool	Trac
Version covered	0.95
Home page	http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/162
Summary	Ties your issue-tracking system into a Wiki to enhance communication about your software, and ties all that together with your Subversion repository to track exactly what’s going on with the code
License type	Custom
Online resources	Mailing lists, Wiki, FAQ
Related tools in this book	BugTracker.NET, ...