Tracker discourages use

[yaseppochi (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

Trac may be wonderful, but what I wonder is how regular users can stand it!

1. Trac forgets my login when following most links. I'm not really sure what's going on here, because it doesn't always do this. For example, if I enter "​http://www.macports.org/", then go there, it remembers earlier logins in the current browser sessin, and if there is no login session, the password memory makes logging in easy. Both facilities fail when I follow links into the tracker. Maybe it's that trac doesn't live at www.macports.org, but at trac.macports.org, and my browser doesn't send the cookie.

2. All trac pages should have a New Bug button.

3. Many displays assume I have space for a 1200 pixel width window. (a) I don't on several of my workstations (subnotebooks), and (b) I am not a fan of letting any application take over my entire screen, especially not one subject to network delays.

4. This wouldn't be so bad (the wide display does contain a lot of information, and it's quite useful to keep it on one line), except that a lot of useful controls are right-justified and end up off-screen (login, search).

5. There's no easy way to search for bugs against a single port.

6. The custom query as initialized looks for bugs assigned to me. Make that a standard query, for heaven's sake. The custom query is the only available workaround for #5, so you're encouraging users to enter duplicate bugs by making it annoying to search for existing bugs. The custom query should be initialized to search the summary.

7. Ticket properties are insane. Yes, I've come to "expect" MacPorts to throw at least one reportable bug a week, not to mention frequent minor annoyances, but what does "Priority: expected" mean in terms of getting things fixed?

Version: Most bugs have nothing to do with the version of "port", and everything to do with the portfile. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be a way to express the fact that you're tracking base by subversion, which is where you'd expect the most "port" bugs to show up.

Component: is trac "www" or "infrastructure"? Does "Uninstaller" really need its own component?

Severity: hardly seems the right way to describe an enum of "Crash/data loss", "Serious", "Security", "Performance", "Other".

Keywords: What keywords are acceptable?

8. Help isn't very visible.

9. Help doesn't describe this tracker in any detail.

10. Help doesn't describe this tracker accurately (it implies that Priority/Severity should not be separate properties).