OpenIDProblems with Trac? Switch to FSFS
I’m head over heels in love with Trac, and have been for about 6 months now. It really is best-of-breed software: it neatly integrates a wiki, a simple bug tracker and a Subversion repository browser with clean markup, a nice default design and a learning curve for new users that can be measured in minutes. No wonder it’s started to show up all over the place.
The software has only two disadvantages. The first is that it’s hideously difficult to install thanks to the myriad of dependencies (although apt-get on Debian or Fink on OS X go a good way towards lessening the blow). The second is that if you’re using BDB and you’re not careful it can corrupt your repository. Thankfully this corruption isn’t permanent (you can revert it with svnadmin recover) but it’s still very, very annoying.
Happily, a solution exists to problem two. Subversion 1.1 introduces a new storage mechanism called FSFS. The advantages and disadvantages are discussed in this advocacy document, but the key advantages as far as Trac is concerned appear to be “Write access not required for read operations”, “Little or no need for recovery” and “No umask issues”. Switching a BDB Subversion repository over to FSFS is short and painless, and provided you have up-to-date Subversion/Python bindings Trac will be able to access the new repository without needing any other changes at all. I’ve made the switch on my local machine and the weird corruption and performance issues I was having have vanished without a trace.
For the record, the trick to successfully installing Trac with Fink is to make sure it’s pulling from the “unstable” tree. That will give you Subversion 1.1 (with FSFS support) and allow you to install the trac-py23 package which should sort everything out for you. The instructions on the Trac wiki cover the essentials, but be sure not to miss the troubleshooting note about using a custom shell script in place of the regular trac.cgi.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss - 4th March 2005 03:17 - #
I agree simon - I have also just dived head first in to a relationship with Trac! ;)
I agree about the dependancies, but I also have another little gripe.
You cannot use Trac admin to remove Wiki pages. While this may seem trivial, it has seriously impeeded my atempts to wrtie a simple customised install shell script.
I found a ticket on the edgewall Trac wiki for this problem, but it was closed. So . I re-opened it
By the way, I have heared somewhere that there is going to be an XML-RCP API for Trac in the neer future. This should be exicting. :)
Noah Slater - 4th March 2005 07:58 - #
Manuzhai - 4th March 2005 08:50 - #
I'm not sure I agree about the "myriad of dependencies" thing. Except for a web server and Subversion (which you probably already have if you want to install Trac), you'll need to make sure you have the Subversion Python bindings, ClearSilver, SQLite and its Python bindings.
From my experience, the one dependency that most people have problems with are the Subversion Python bindings, which again require SWIG. There's not much we can do about that though, seeing that Trac is a Python app integrated with Subversion.
The SQLite dependency might go away when we allow using different databases such as PostgreSQL. But SQLite arguably makes Trac installation easier than it could be with a true client/server DBMS -- once you have it installed, that is.
To conclude, the Trac team isn't liberally adding dependency on a ton of external packages just for the fun of it... Otherwise, thanks for the kind coverage :-)
Christopher Lenz - 4th March 2005 10:51 - #
Simon Willison - 7th March 2005 17:43 - #
Jeremy Dunck - 8th March 2005 16:46 - #
alexander - 28th July 2005 19:51 - #