no documentation on how to comment

[zefram@…]

I was pointed at a Trac ticket, on a project I'm peripherally involved in, and invited to add some relevant comments. This is my first encounter with Trac, so I head to the documentation (conveniently linked from the ticket page) to find out how to add a comment. After some searching round the TracGuide, including particularly close examination of the TracTickets page, I have reached the conclusion that the documentation does not give any clue on this matter. (TracTickets gives some philosophical clue about how comments are treated, once they exist, but doesn't say anything about how they come to exist.) I reckon that's a documentation bug.

For completeness, I note that the ticket page also doesn't provide any clue about adding comments. I wouldn't really expect it to, and don't consider that a bug, but if it did provide adequate clue then I probably wouldn't have run into the guide's defecit. The particular Trac instance I'm using is that for the Parrot project, at <​http://trac.parrot.org/parrot/>. After finding the Trac documentation there lacking, I also checked the documentation at <​http://trac.edgewall.org>, and found it equally lacking.

I incidentally noticed that the documentation is deficient regarding the other most basic bug-tracking activity, of submitting a new bug report. The TracGuide doesn't seem to cover it at all. trac.parrot.org doesn't seem to have anything outside TracGuide about it either, but I haven't looked very hard. trac.edgewall.org has some specific wiki pages about reporting bugs in Trac, which led to the web form that I'm now using; I didn't see any clue about submitting bug reports by email, which would have been my preferred mechanism.

[Christian Boos]

Replying to zefram@…:

I didn't see any clue about submitting bug reports by email, which would have been my preferred mechanism.

That's because it's not supported out of the box. You can suggest to the Trac admins of trac.parrot.org that they could install the ​TracHacks:EmailtoTracScript.

Otherwise, thanks for your suggestions, we'll try to integrate them in a future version of the user documentation.

[zefram@…]

My comment about submitting reports by email pertained to trac.edgewall.org. I'll try to find some way to suggest to *its* admins that it should support email. And I'll suggest to the trac.parrot.org admins that they should provide the documentation that Trac lacks.

I note that this ticket page on trac.edgewall.org does provide clue about adding comments, specifically a web form for doing so (which I'm now using). trac.parrot.org has no such thing on its ticket pages. Presumably there's some relevant configuration difference between trac.parrot.org and trac.edgewall.org.

[Christian Boos]

Replying to zefram@…:

My comment about submitting reports by email pertained to trac.edgewall.org. I'll try to find some way to suggest to *its* admins that it should support email.

No, we won't. As this is the main Trac site, we want our users to exercise the core functionality (as limited as it is ;-) ). So we install as few plugins or extensions as possible.

[Christian Boos]

TracWiki@26, WikiNewPage@4 and TracTickets@56 all modified to mention the need to check for local editing policy.