A couple weeks ago I posted about moving our SVN repositories to a hosted solution at CVSDude.com. I primarily wanted to do that so that I wouldn’t have to be responsible for administering the SVN server (performing backups, configuring hook scripts etc). I’ve got enough on my plate right now without trying to become an SVN guru. Another reason is that they offer Trac as an option for your repositories (with certain types of accounts). I have been wanting to start using Trac to manage tickets for a while, but the install and configuration process is still quite a bit outside my range of Linux knowledge at this point.
One thing that has bugged me in our business is a lack of a good, centralized place to store lists of things that I need to do. A few years ago when we only had 1 or 2 projects going, I could keep all this stuff in my head. Now, as we have more clients and more projects going (and probably due in some measure to me getting older), I find that certain things are starting to get lost in the shuffle. This makes a really bad impressions on clients and is frustrating for me as well. That’s where Mylyn comes in.
Mylyn is a plugin for Eclipse that lets you set up queries against the tickets in Trac and view those from within Eclipse itself. It’s like having someone who constantly updates your To Do list for you. Once you’ve got everything configured, Eclipse periodically synchronizes your Task list with the Trac site and pops up an alert window if there are any new tasks that come down. Setup was pretty simple (if you’re using CVSDude, they have an easy-to-follow guide to setup the Eclipse plugin with their system).
Since I have each project set up in its own SVN repository, it’s as simple as adding a “task library” for each repo and suddenly I have one place to look for all the things I need to do, automatically grouped by project. I think I’m going to like what Eclipse/Trac/Mylyn will do for me.