[Trac] Why does Trac use SQLite for Wiki?

trac at nogga.de trac at nogga.de
Wed Aug 18 13:03:34 UTC 2004
Hi,

>  I read that Trac future features include support for alternative
>  source control software. Adding a dependency on a specific one should
>  be avoided.

I would even vote for a tighter integration of trac and subversion (e.g. 
a post-2010 issue to have subversion and trac merged together :-). The 
reason for my opinion is, that having this design goal is a nice 
developer task, but it only cuts trac down in possible features. If you 
try to find a common interface for different version control software 
you can necessarily only support those feautres available in all 
versioning software. You will loose all features available through 
subversion, esp. unique revision numbers, changesets (and perhaps custom 
properties)

There are a lot of tools available that integrate with other versioning 
tools like bugzilla, I think, there is even a CVSTrac software 
available. There is no need to gain some importance in using trac with 
cvs e.g.

Trac looks very promising and has the power to build an high grade 
integrated IssueTracking, Wiki, ProjectManagment, Documentation, and so 
forth tool. Don't cut features only because you want to support older 
versioning software, that does not provide the necessary infrastructure.

Just my 2 cents.

For the original discussion, about why use SQL for the wiki, I asked 
myself the same question, when I first read about Trac. Another writer 
also stated that it would be wonderful, if some project documentation 
(now stored in the wiki) could be part of the svn repository itself. 
This looks like a task for an InterWiki. Having different wiki store 
backends that can reside in different places come into my mind.

For the WIKI and SQL issue: There was some discussion to add an SQL 
backend to subversion as a 2.0 feature. Don't know wether this is still 
true. But perhaps trac can use this backend to store changing wiki pages 
within a SQL database without loosing the possibility of querying the 
database itself. 

After I have converted our VSS repository to subversion, I will also 
start using TRAC. For what I have seen right now, it is a good peace of 
software.

Best regards
Dirk