Python, Trac, and Agile

Haven't blogged in a few days, and it's not because I've been burned out from my blogging sprint two weeks ago like some people suggested. I've been under the weather and have had a lot of other things going on that required my attention. I actually have drafted several posts, just haven't published any of them for a variety of reasons. I have been getting good feedback still from several of my older posts, so that's nice to see.

At work we've been trying to become more Agile, and my boss has started using the curious words "agile" and "scrum" more frequently. We've had a very small team here for a while and our development processes have been very ad hoc and personalized. When your "team" is one person, and each "department" is one or two people, it's hard to say we need to implement particular methodologies to help promote better team development. Of course, as we grow the need for more standardized methodologies is becoming clear.

We set up a development server with SVN, Trac, and MediaWiki for our team to use. We had been using DynamSoft's Visual Source Anywhere Hosted service for our source control, which worked reasonably well when our team was smaller. However, as we grew larger and as our network infrastructure became more capable, it was less and less of an attractive option then running our own SVN repository on one of our development servers. We were also using DynamSoft's Issue Tracking Anywhere, which I never liked personally and found to be far less helpful to us then a free alternative like Trac or Bugzilla would be.

So I created installed SVN and created the repository (easy), installed XAMPP (easy) and MediaWiki (very easy). Then, it was time to install Trac. Saying that the installation (and ongoing configuration and maintenance) was difficult is an understatement. Welcome to dependency hell. Lasciate ogni speranza voi chi entrate.

XAMPP installed Apache 2.2, and I picked up the "latest" SVN (which is what the Trac documentation specified), which happens to be 1.6.3. I'm running this whole monstrous software stack on Windows Server. And don't tell me to use Linux instead, that isn't an acceptable or available solution in this case. I first tried installing everything on the existing IIS server, but that was even worse of a nightmare. So, I have made some concessions by running Apache instead (although the IT guys aren't thrilled about having one special-case Apache server in a whole network of all IIS servers, but they are going to deal with it).

Between the core Python distribution (2.5), modpython (3.3.1), the python SVN bindings, and Trac, there are very very few setups that I can use to ensure compatibility. Combine this with the fact that I have the newest SVN (1.6.3 at the time) and the newest Apache (2.2), and there are very few configurations that seem to work. Following the installation instructions for Trac alone give me huge headaches because the versions specified in the installation instructions don't work together, and that's straight out of the Trac documentation.

I've been able to get Trac o.11 installed and working but I have not been able to install any of the plugins we are interested in. Apparently most of the newest plugins expect Trac 0.11 to have Genshi 0.6, but my installation manages only to have Genshi 0.5.2. I tried to update, but Genshi doesn't appear to be compatible with Python 2.5 or something, and that failed. Too many error messages that I've seen over the course of a week of trying now, I can't remember what they all are specifically.

We already have Trac installed and in use by our team, so I'm not switching now to use Bugzilla or something different. However, as my first real experience with the Python ecosystem I am severely unimpressed and even disheartened. It is far more difficult getting these kinds of things installed then it should be. I don't deny that I've been a bit spoiled by Perls CPAN, and Ubuntus apt-get repository system, things that just work when I want them to.

The documentation I have seen (when any even exists) and the "help" I've been able to get from people is sub-par at best. Maybe that's the norm in the Python world or the open source world in general, and that's very upsetting to think about. It is all the more reason why I believe so strongly in the Parrot concepts of interoperability and platform abstraction.