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:
- Trac has answered most of my needs until now.
- It’s well spread and has an active community.
- 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.
Did you migrate to Redmine in the end?
Hi Robert,
Actually no I didn’t. Nothing against Redmine. I simply realized that at that stage I didn’t even actually need all the bits that were provided by Trac and I didn’t want the burden of migrating for no good reason. I still keep redmine in mind however… the day I will truly need to migrate.
If you do end up considering migration, note that it’s fairly easy. http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/RedmineMigrate provides a reasonably automated solution.
I am using Redmine and it is the best choice of free project management software. The only better choice is Jira, which cost a little bit
Redmine helped me with many procedures I had to manage with my peers, including version control (and automatically closing issues from commit log is a bless, believe me!).
I can go on like this, but this is my subjective opinion. Everybody should feel free to discover Redmine on their own (there is demo on the official web page)!