trac-admin initenv should prompt for an email address (so that new tickets will be assigned to a real person)

[Jason Spiro <jasonspiro4@…>]

Current behavior

The trac-admin initenv command prepopulates the database with two components, named component1 and component2. But the owner field for those components is set to the invalid email address somebody. So, using Trac as shipped, new tickets aren't assigned to anyone. So, even after the Trac administrator turns on smtp_enabled, Trac doesn't send any notifications to developers.

Why that's bad

Joel Spolsky, author of "User Interface Design for Programmers", says "In a good bug tracking system, [bugs are] automatically assigned to the lead developer."¹ This makes developers much more likely to read and respond to bug reports. Bugzilla seems to follow Joel's rule: when a sysadmin installs Bugzilla, Bugzilla asks them for an email address and password for creating the first user². Trac is wonderful software, but doesn't follow Joel's rule.

Proposed fix

trac-admin initenv should prompt for the email address of the person installing Trac. It should set the owner of the two components it creates (component1 and component2) to that email address. (Later on, the person who installed Trac can change the owners to the actual developers of those components.)

Footnotes ^1. In his article "Painless Bug Tracking", posted at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000029.html ^2. I found that out from http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/3.0/html/useradmin.html#defaultuser . I haven't actually checked that Bugzilla sets the owner of the default product to that user, but it's safe to assume that it does.

[osimons]

I lean towards agreement with this. This default 'main' user(email) should then be stored in

 [project]
 admin = 

... a setting that is default empty on install.