[tor-dev] Survey on Tor Trac usage and how you manage your tasks

[katmagic]

Sorry for the late reply — I haven't checked my email in a while — but
I'm replying anyway because I've some strong feelings on this issue. In
short, Trac sucks. My issues with it are as follows:

1. The design sucks.

2. There's no AJAX. Now, I know a lot of people on this list hate Web
2.0, but I really think its irrational. Especially over Tor, reloading
pages as many times as Trac makes you do is time consuming and
cumbersome. Of course, I'm not advocating making it *require*
JavaScript, but it would certainly be a nice feature.

3. An unreasonable number of pages must be navigated through in order to
perform simple functions. The difficult of doing this prevents people
from finding bugs, and therefore discourages contribution.

4. There are too many options. There are oodles of options that must be
fiddled with every single time a ticket is created, and if one makes a
mistake, it's not possible to go back and edit the ticket.

5. Searching for tickets is a confusing and somewhat difficult task. In
order to search for one's own tickets, for example, one must navigate a
menu with FORTY choices with unclear labels.

6. Searching in general doesn't work very well. Whatever algorithm Trac
uses for search is awful.

7. Trac sends email about your own modifications, and about a lot of
things people probably don't want email about (i.e. every comment on a
ticket). A significantly improved method would be to offer notifications
on the website itself.

8. Trac does not integrate with Git. It should allow you to reference
commits from tickets, and reference tickets from commit messages (viewed
in the web interface). Being able to close tickets from commit messages
would also be useful.

9. HTTP Basic authentication could be confusing for some users. A
cookies-based system would probably be easier, and allow for persistent
logins (which most people consider a good thing).

10. "Points" are annoying. I'm not personally a fan of 'agile
development', and I really don't want to get notifications about it.
Again, finer-grained control over notifications would probably solve
this.

Because of these reasons, I think Trac actually discourages
contribution. It's *much* easier to report a bug, say, on GitHub than on
Trac, and it's much easier to get updates about progress on it; both of
which are things that are important to the average person reviewing a
bug.

~ Kat
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