Most Frequently Reported Bugs in Trac

We have lots of tickets and lots of users, so it's not unlikely that sometimes a bug will be reported twice, or thrice, or … dozens of times for some!

Here's a short list of the issues with a pathologically high duplicate rate:

#9403: ValueError: timestamp out of range for platform time_t (see all)

This is not even a bug, rather an installation issue. This is typically seen when upgrading a Trac installation to 0.12 then downgrading to 0.11 again. During the upgrade, the timestamps previously stored as number of seconds since Unix epoch were converted to microseconds. If the Trac 0.11 code sees that database again, it won't be able to deal with these larger values correctly and will throw this error. Solution: make sure you're using 0.12 (or at worst, revert to the backup database generated during the upgrade)

#5028: TracError: Unsupported version control system "svn" (see all)

Also an installation issue. The error means that for some reason, the Python bindings to the Subversion libraries couldn't be found or loaded. The TracSubversion page provides detailed troubleshooting information. In Trac 0.11, if this problem happens, it will only be reported as a warning for non-repository related pages.

The error message has been improved, so this issue is less frequently reported now (#6796)

#3839: Authentication information not available. (see all)

Despite lots of information in the TracInstall and other places, there are still a lot of people being surprised by this message, which simply indicates that no authentication information has been setup for the server. How to actually set it depends on the actual form of the deployment, as mentioned in the FAQ.

#3371: RuntimeError: instance.__dict__ not accessible in restricted mode (see all)

A problem inherent to the SWIG-based Subversion bindings when they are used from multiple Python interpreters in the same process. That situation can happen when the Trac server front-end is mod_python or mod_wsgi. See TracSubversion#instance-dict-restricted-mode for the mod_python instructions and ​IntegrationWithTrac for the mod_wsgi instructions.

#3446: Rate of database is locked errors is too high (see all)

This used to be a plague with the SQLite database backend, but it seems that things improved over time and this once #1 duplicate bug is less frequent those days. The problem should even be completely gone with 0.11.6 or 0.12dev. A more scary variant of #3446 is #4929, where the lock situation seems to persist and needs a server restart (rare).

#4311: 'cStringIO.StringO' object has no attribute 'len' (see all)

Attaching files won't work with Trac < 0.10.4 and Python 2.5. This was a simple compatibility issue with Python 2.5, which was reported and fixed. It's surprising how people keep using old versions of the software and keep re-discovering the same bug over and over…

#4365: "HTMLParseError: bad end tag" (see all)

Yes, we know, SilverCity has a bug which is apparently fixed in its version 0.9.7. SilverCity on t.e.o needs to be updated ;-)

#6976 TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'NoneType' objects (see all)

This is a bug in the ​TH:GitPlugin for Trac on nonexistent paths, see ​TH:ticket:2671