Midnight Oil

A project I’m working on recently switched from Subversion (SVN) to Bazaar (BZR) for its Version Control System (VCS). Of the many things we didn’t like about Subversion (merging, line-ending conflicts, etc..), there were some things we’d grown to like, primarily the mature 3rd party ecosystem and its bread-winner Trac.Thankfully there are projects to extend Trac’s reach to other VCSs.

Of interest to me was trac-bzr. Since Bazzar has the power of Canonical behind it, a cursory glance at the “universe” repository shows a package named “trac-bzr”. However a closer look reveals that this package is quite outdated:

>apt-cache show trac-bzr
Package: trac-bzr
Priority: optional
Section: universe/python
Installed-Size: 156
Maintainer: Ubuntu MOTU Developers <ubuntu-motu@lists.ubuntu.com>
Original-Maintainer: Chris Lamb <chris@chris-lamb.co.uk>
Architecture: all
Version: 0.2+bzr31-3
...

This seemed like a bad idea, seeing as the main branch was already at r69.

Here are the instructions on installing the latest version:

1. Make sure you have bzr installed

sudo apt-get install bzr

2. Get the latest version of trac

sudo apt-get install trac

3. Get the latest version of trac-bzr, and put it in a revisioned directory.

bzr export ./trac-bzr-r`bzr revno lp:trac-bzr` lp:trac-bzr

4. Install the plugin

cd trac-bzr-r*
python setup.py install

5. Configure trac to use the plugin as described in the trac-bzr README