Display deployments in timeline

[pete@…]

We write web applications. When we come to a point where we want to deploy a version of our application, we tag it, and export the tag to the live webserver.

We would find it useful if such an operation were recorded in the project timeline. That is, as a specific event (with its own cute little icon and everything ;-) ).

This could be accomplished by Trac when it parses the changeset log (of the svn tag (well, copy) operation); if a particular keyword is present, Trac could put an item in the timeline.

[Christopher Lenz]

You should be able to use milestones for that. I think they're a perfect fit for this.

[pete@…]

Milestones are not quite what we want. During our testing and release cycle, we might have many release candidates for a milestone that get rejected as bugs are found. Every release candidate gets its own tag in SVN. We would like an entry in the timeline for each release candidate deployment, ideally - there are potentially many, per milestone.

The key thing here is that we want to track events that have happened, but are not necessarily planned down to the time of day.

As for milestones, we haven't experimented with them yet, we're on v0.7.1. We cannot see them in the timeline on Trac's Trac, because none of your milestones have dates…

We don't know how milestones in the future are to be represented, because of this - a graphical timeline on the roadmap screen would be very nice, but we couldn't speculate as to how practical to implement.

[Christopher Lenz]

Okay, so how would you envision adding deployment info to Trac?

I think this kind of stuff is a good candidate for pluggable modules (#439). For example, I have automated builds (think continuous integration) going on for a lot of projects, and I'd like to have builds show up in the timeline, and look at the build logs from within Trac. I don't want to add the builds manually to Trac, but rather have the build process publish build events to Trac.

Because such things are not easily generalizable, making them extensions that easily plugin to Trac makes a lot of sense IMHO.

[pete@…]

Yes, precisely that. If we had an automated build process, we would want it to publish to Trac (especially if it failed…).

And I agree it makes sense to do as a module.

I don't have any useful ideas about what to add to Trac to describe a deployment/build event, however, other than date+time, revision built/deployed, target built-to/deployed-to, who kicked off the event and mundane stuff like that.

[james.moger@…]

I've hacked together a basic release manager which may fit your needs. I created the patch to satisfy my own feature requests: #505 and #959. You can get it at TracReleaselist. Its available as a patch for 0.8, not 0.7.1. Unfortunately, my patch advances the global database index number, which will make it unfriendly to future Trac updates. Hopefully TracReleaselist or something analagous will work with the TracPluggableModules proposal once it is resolved.

[Christopher Lenz]

This kind of thing can now be done using TracPlugins.