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I took a close look at Edgewall Software’s trac tool today. It’s an integrated bug-tracker, wiki, Subversion repository browser and general project goal management tool, all available in a single web interface. It’s open-source and free for anyone to download.

The tight coupling of all the services seems to be a major win for this tracking tool. All of the components are aware of changes in the other components and can react appropriately. This is apparent in the timeline view that picks out changes from all the modules and puts it into a single project overview.

trac also features an interesting concept for storing its current state – it keeps it in Subversion itself, serialized as XML. This gives you the ability to roll your project back to a previous revision if something goes wrong, as well as giving you direct access to the data itself to modify externally. On top of all this, it’s been designed with a pluggable architecture from the ground up, potentially allowing developers to add custom functionality as necessary.

From what I can tell, they look like they’ve done a lot of work on the new, unreleased version. It’s been a few months since the last release, but this upcoming release should be well worth it.

UPDATE: Fixed the URL.

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