Release Notes for Trac 0.11 Genshi Release

Preliminary Note: - Trac 0.11 is still in heavy development and undergoing a lot of changes.

Highlights

• New template engine for generating content (​Genshi)
• New configurable workflow in the ticket subsystem
• Finer-grained control of permissions
• Support for ​Pygments as the default syntax highlighter
• Improved repository browser ("blame" support, dynamic in-place expansion of folders)
• Improved user preferences subsystem, among which the possibility for an user to select his time zone and disable access keys
• The WebAdmin plugin is now an integral part of Trac

Detailed User Visible Changes

User Preferences

A new user preference module has been added. It presents by default several panels and plugins can easily add their own user settings there:

• General (name and e-mail information)
• Date & Time (timezone)
• Keyboard Shortcuts (enable/disable)
• Pygments Theme
• Advanced (restore session)

Most significantly, support for setting the time zone has been added to the Date & Time panel.

Each user can select which time zone they want timestamps to be presented in. If ​pytz is installed a complete list of time zones will be available, otherwise Trac will fall back on a shorter list from an internal time zone implementation.

General

Setuptools is now used for the packaging

This means you'll be able to just do

easy_install Trac

once we've made the release.

It also means that a number of things had to be changed to make this work correctly. In particular, Trac no longer implicitly assumes nor installs global data in the $prefix/share/trac. Instead, you'll have to modify the configuration of your project environments to explicitly “inherit” a global configuration in trac.ini, for example:

[inherit]
file = /etc/trac/trac.ini

This will load the configuration from the /etc/trac/trac.ini file, while of course allowing to override any global settings in the environment's configuration.

In that global configuration, you can specify shared directories for templates and plugins, e.g.:

[inherit]
plugins_dir = /etc/trac/plugins/
templates_dir = /etc/trac/templates/

Note: naming of these options may still change until the final 0.11 release

Improved Syntax Highlighting

Trac can now use the ​Pygments syntax highlighter out-of-the-box. This is a much nicer syntax highlighter than the one previously supported (SilverCity, Enscript and PHP).

Wiki

• Usability improvements:
  • possibility to review changes before saving a new version of a page
  • basic handling of conflicts in case of concurrent edits
  • Restored direct link to History and revert to an Index link, from where it's easy to switch between the Index by Title and Index by Date
  • The [[PageOutline]] macro now works as expected in preview mode
• Wiki syntax improvements:
  • most TracLinks now accept trailing arguments (?…) and targets (#…)
  • more intuitive relative links ([.. parent page], [./OtherPage sibling page], [/WikiStart toplevel page])
  • relative links like [#anchor see this section] always link to the proper originating page or ticket, irrelevant from where the wiki text appears (e.g. in the timeline)

Ticket System

• The ticket workflow is now configurable, see TracWorkflow
• Improved preview, showing the comment preview at the top of the page, so one can see at the same time the preview of the comment and the preview of the fields and the description in the ticket box
• It is now possible to examine the changes made to the ticket description and textual custom fields
• Like for the concurrent wiki edits, a conflict due to simultaneous editing of a ticket by two or more users lead to warnings, minimizing the risk for the user to loose his changes
• Improved custom queries:
  • selectable columns
  • possibility to save custom queries as reports
  • possibility to configure the default custom query, both for anonymous and authenticated users

Repository Browser

• "Blame" support (annotation of every line with the changeset which last modified them)
• Dynamically expandable folders for Javascript enabled browsers
• "Quickjump" navigation menu for easily going to branches and tags
• Alternative text view on diffs for Javascript enabled browsers
• Significantly improved patch renderer (supports extended diff formats)
• Support for svn:externals and other properties. Improved display of property changes. In addition, support for custom properties can be added through plugins.

Lots of other minor improvements

• e-mail obfuscation everywhere turned on by default (can be disabled project wide or on a per-user basis
• possibility to configure the navigation bars (see TracNavigation)
• …

Caveats

• It is strongly advised to set the [trac] base_url setting for generating correct URLs outside the context of a user request.
• The [trac] templates_dir setting is considered harmful… You probably need to remove that setting when you browse Trac and get the following plain text error:

  TemplateNotFound: Template "error.html" not found
  

  FIXME is this still the case?
• The support for MySQL as a database backend has not improved significantly in any ways… It is still considered to be experimental for 0.11. YMMV.

Wiki Macros

The change in templating engines necessitated a change in wiki macros. The HelloWorld and Timestamp macros which are distributed with trac will not work as released.

For examples of new style macros, see some of the macros which have already been ported at MacroBazaar or ports of HelloWorld and Timestamp attached to #5274.

Developer-visible changes

Genshi template engine

Trac now uses the ​Genshi template engine instead of ClearSilver. Plugins using the latter will still be supported in Trac 0.11, but probably not longer.

datetime everywhere

Trac used to handle time informations as int timestamps. Now we're using datetime objects.

Internal API changes

A detailed view of the API changes since 0.10.x can be found in TracDev/ApiChanges/0.11.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the growing number of people who have, and continue to, support the project. Also our thanks to all people providing feedback and bug reports that helps us making Trac better, easier to use and more effective.

Without your invaluable help, Trac would not evolve. Thank you all.

Finally, we offer hope that Trac will prove itself useful to like-minded programmers around the world, and that this release will prove an improvement over the last version.

Please let us know. :-)

/The Trac Team ​http://trac.edgewall.org/