Multiple Projects within a Single Trac Environment

This is an alternative conception about how to manage multiple projects with Trac. The traditional way is to follow the model of TracMultipleProjects/MultipleEnvironments.

Yet there has been since a long time many request for being able to manage multiple projects within a single Trac environment, in order to have a unified view on the development activity.

Possible motivations for having a single Environment

• one single wiki, which facilitates the building of shared knowledge (development guidelines, development process documentaion, tips and tricks, customer information, etc.)
• possibility of sharing Milestones between projects (useful for coordinating a single release of different applications)
• sharing tickets between projects, and moving them between projects

One or Multiple Repositories?

The oldest ticket presenting this approach is #130. It asked for being able to browse multiple projects residing in different repositories. This is unlikely to happen in the short term. One of the problems this would raise is the ambiguity it introduces in TracLinks (however, the InterTrac approach, explained in TracMultipleProjects/MultipleEnvironments could be extended to adapt to this situation too).

Since then, other people have expressed in #130, #548 and also very clearly in #1048, that it would already be a big step ahead to support multiple projects located within a single (Subversion) repository, in a single Trac environment.

Possible implementation

The ticket #1048, as well as ticket #1135, suggest that the already existing Component ticket field could be used to represent a project.

cboos explained in ticket #586 (although that ticket belongs to the other multiple component support family) how this could be implemented using the experimental relationship facility introduced in the source:branches/cboos-dev/trac-obj-branch branch.

more explanations to come…