Developers' Corner

A blackboard for ideas related to future directions

(or, How do we bribe the aliens so that we can reach milestone:2.0?)

More seriously, this is more for drafting long term ideas; for the actual coordination of on-going tasks, see TracDev/ToDo.

Development Process Issues

Regarding ../:

1. Core development has stagnated
   Probably true, we need more people to actively care about the project. How?
   1. lowering the barrier to entry
      We could achieve this by providing better docs, API docs, cleaner and simpler code
   2. motivating people to jump over the barrier
      
      • the great new feature!
      • nice stuff that really makes Trac stand out of the competition
      • cookies!
   3. Some ideas which may be completely off the mark…
      • ?? Use more standard libraries. Templating has moved to Genshi, but maybe SQLAlchemy for DB backend?
      • ?? Highlight issues that should be easy for new people to fix
      • ?? Google summer of code mentoring (requires time though)
2. Core developers do not or cannot commit a lot of time to the project
   Whip them? Otherwise, see 1.
3. Frequently requested features do not get implemented
   Big features (e.g. MultiProjectSupport) first need to have a developer really needing the feature, as it can't be done without some kind of deep involvement. See 1.2.
4. Release cycle is way too slow
   (need a picture showing Release History)
   I proposed something with intermediate point releases, see ​googlegroups:trac-dev:7f875005134cd355. We should actually do it.
5. Zero chance of a plugin getting into the core
   Well, WebAdmin was integrated. There was some attempt to do the same for ​AccountManagerPlugin (see also WhatUsersWant), but see 3. Note that some plugins will never be integrated or even bundled, due to licensing issues (TracMercurial and ​GitPlugin).
6. Features that users think should be "core" are not
   Since 0.12, there's a new tracopt. package hierarchy, for bundling components that are not enabled by default. This makes it possible to have some room between strictly necessary for almost anyone using Trac (trac.) and optional, must be 3^rd party.