CashHanded #4: RTrac #
People love codefests. Many things change over time, but a few things are always the same. People have always and will always love codefests. In fact, everyone does. But, in particular, you love codefests. It is a basic human need.
Scientists estimate that a human being can only survive for about four hours without codefests. But I probably shouldn’t mention such deprivation. My point isn’t to be gorey.
Two of my colleagues have mentioned building a bug tracker application in Rails. Here. Here. At first, I thought, “No.” It seemed too great an endeavor for a codefest.
But I started thinking about it and perhaps, just by tying together a number of elements, you finish a Trac clone. It would require a decent team: an individual who knows Instiki or Ruwiki internals, a Railser who can assemble the ticketing system, and an HTTP magician who can start by simply wrapping the Subversion web access.
Yeah, it’s possible.
Now, you want to see how Ruby-Core tracks bugs? See mput.dip.jp.
Kent
I’ve been thinking about extending my BugTrack application to Trac functionality. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about Subversion.
gabriele
Well, the svn book is your friend; http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ Is not /that/ different from cvs, in the end.
Imo you could easily own the tracking world once you provide an extensible framework where other VCSs (arch, darcs, p4, monotone, whatever) can be plugged, and even more important an xmlrpc-ish, Okay-ish or RES Tful interface able to be used programmatically.
zenspider
maybe it is just me, I dunno, but I don’t see the point of putting any of the codefest money towards application ports. Frameworks and libraries, of course, because we can then turn around and reuse them in our frameworks, libraries, and apps. But to port a perfectly functional app just because it isn’t written in the language you like? That doesn’t seem like a good investment to me.
gabriele
I used to agree with you. Then I started considering how a great open source app could be a good thing for ruby, since it allows people to meet the language, to accept the idea that successfull applications can be built with it, and stuff like that. I’d still prefer a cool library to an application, but I think we already have most of the library I’d ever need :)
andreas
Ruby lucene bindings would be extremely cool and helpful for many applications. I really don’t see the point in cloning trac.
why
Good points, people.
Certainly bindings are more useful in the long run. A Trac clone could still be a great codefest, though, because it’s split into obvious parts which could be tackled by attendants. And there are enough folks out there who just want to tinker with Rails that this gives them the opportunity to gather and do it, rather than do it at home.
So while it may not be a pinnacle among good ideas, I think it’s a fine idea in the context of peaking interest for a codefest.
Then again, I don’t have a need for Lucene bindings like I have a need for a bug tracker I can tweak.
why
Hey, Kent. Is BugTrack a Rails app? Do tell.
kent
Yes, it’s powered by Rails. There is a rubyforge bugtrack project
zenspider
a tad anal, but it is “piquing”. :P
P.S. I can’t use ampersand ell tee semicolon OR less-than OR right square bracket in this thing. So much for the BS xml tags.
chris2
Please make a survey before implementing any kind of bugtracker. Somehow I never saw people satsified by the bugtrackers they use. :-)
darren
Hey kent I have downloaded and looked at bugtrack – nice. I am trying to modify it for my own purposes but i am a ruby and rails n00b – can i email you with questions ?
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