Redmine Vs Trac

I installed Redmine to take it for a spin and my first impression was generally favourable. I'm a long time Trac user, but lately development on Trac seems to have slowed. I decided it was time to check out other options.

The one area where Redmine beats Trac hands down is the admin interface. By comparison Trac's admin interface was until recently a third party plugin which has now been incorporated into Trac itself. Even so, you will still need to edit the configuration file for some things, which hasn't been necessary in Redmine at all so far.

The other significant difference is that Redmine is multiproject. This has been been a long standing feature request on Trac, but it never designed to work that way. Converting Trac to be multiproject is possible, but it had to be forked (DrProject) and took a lot of work. In fact, DrProject has already been supplanted by Basie, so there is limit to what can be done with the existing Trac code base.

Redmine's issue tracker has one notable feature. You can enter time estimates and actual duration of work on each ticket, and display the information on a Gantt chart. Personally, I have no use for Gantt charts but I know managers love 'em, so that feature alone maybe enough to convince your boss to try Redmine.

I started a project using Redmine so that I can get long term impression. So far I haven't seen anything that I make me not use it. Oh, except maybe that it is written in Ruby. Sorry, I had to find something negative say...