Friday, December 09, 2005

Subversion plus Trac gives SubTraction

Here's a bit of a "plug" for some open source SCM tool offerrings ...

For those CVS users who don't already know about Subversion I urge you to take a look. Subversion was designed to be a next-generation replacement for CVS that has a lot of the same basic syntax and development model while fixing or updating most of its well known shortcomings.

Another spiffy open-source project that integrates with both CVS and Subversion is Trac, which provides simple but powerful defect/issue/enhancement tracking (DIET) using a Wiki-web interface, and readily integrates with both CVS and Subversion to add collaborative, low-friction request/activity tracking to your version control and can be used to track change-sets in the version control tool and associate them with change-tasks/requests in the tracking tool.

Using Trac with Subversion can help "subtract" a lot of the tedium of traceability from your day-to-day work and give more "traction" to your development efforts. So, in a way, Subversion plus Trac gives SubTraction :-)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Brad,

I totally agree that Trac really takes the prize for simple and frictionless project tracking. I have about 5 instances of Trac installed for various projects, am we're all totally thrilled with the way that it works for us.

Just to clear a minor misconception, though... Trac does not integrate with CVS, it only integrates with Subversion. There is another project called CVSTrac that can do something similar (but not as elegantly and without the flair that Trac has).

Cheers,
Joe

Brad Appleton said...

Thanks Joe! I knew of CVSTrac and for some reason thought that it was simply Trac for CVS. Thanks for setting me straight. I know Trac looks a whole lot spiffier than the CVSTrac that I remember, and I had assumed it had simply improved quite a bit since I'd last seen it 1-2 years ago.

Anonymous said...

Hi Brad,

Same here. We're a system house in copenhagen and have started using SubVersion/TRAC and it makes things must easier to follow. Assignment of tickets to milestones, elps greatly in our 4 week time boxes.
/john