Redmine vs Trac

Following my last post in regards to a move from subversion to mercurial I received many interesting comments. One key aspect that those comments showed was that no matter which DCVS I would use it would be critical to me that it could be interfaced with Trac since that's the tool I'm using to manage my projects. Jim Jones hinted that I could also see the problem the other way around and decide to change for a different software management tool that would be better at handling the DCVS I'd choose. He led me to discover Redmine.

I wasn't very motivated by the idea of migrating from Trac to a different tool. Many reasons to that:

1. Trac has answered most of my needs until now.
2. It's well spread and has an active community.
3. I'm damn lazy when it comes to such mundane task.

Nonetheless Jim had made me curious and so I did give a look at the Redmine's features and I wasn't disappointed. It basically supports what Trac offers with some more interesting built-in features like Gantt chart, multiple projects, forums, DCVS, etc. Of course most of these features could be integrated to Trac easily thanks to the community (although I can't tell whether or not multiple projects in one Trac instance is feasible).

That being said not everything is perfect in this world and while discussing about this topic on the #kamaelia IRC channel, Matt Hammond, one of the Kamaelia long time project developer, linked me to a note from John Goerzen indicating that social considerations were sometimes as important as technical ones.

I guess you understand that I'm still struggling on which decision to make. Nevertheless redmine looks like a great product and if you're not using any software management tool yet I'm pretty sure you want to give a close look at it.