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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: RedMine
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I've seen a few of Rails based Project Management systems come out in the last couple of years and, frankly, they've all sucked. Today, however, I came across one that looks like it has the potential to replace the GForge based RubyForge. It's called RedMine and it looks pretty darned good IMHO. It has a UI similar to the GForge UI, and most of the features that folks use on RubyForge. I'll touch on the missing features in a bit.
But first, why reinvent the wheel? No, RubyForge should not be replaced with a RubyMine back end simply so that we can have warm, fuzzy feelings that RubyForge is, in fact, written using Ruby code instead of the PHP/Python/Whatever mish-mash that it is now. The reasons are straight forward:
* Better backend support. And by "better" I mean "any at all", i.e. XML-RPC, REST or SOAP. At the moment, everything is done with screen scraping afaik. This would lead to much, much easier integration for future tools and/or websites, such as an raa.rubyforge.org that we could tie into the PM stuff.
* Lower barrier to entry. I don't know PHP at all, and only a little bit of Python, as is the case for many Ruby programmers. By switching to a Ruby based system we'll get more eyes looking at the code, and more people who are able to submit patches. This will also reduce Tom's burden, as other people can write code for him, or respond to feature requests with patches of their own.
* Ruby libraries. If we use a Ruby back end we can integrate 3rd party Ruby libraries with no fuss, and I can use them in any suggested patches.
* Not tied to GForge (duh) and thus, don't have to wait for them to fix bugs or implement features that get filtered down to RubyForge.
* Warm, fuzzy feelings that RubyForge is actually written in Ruby. KIDDING!
And now, the bad news. At the moment I don't see support for mailing lists, CVS or wikis. CVS I could live without - I'd just convert everything over from CVS to SVN and move on. Wikis would be a deal breaker for some, though personally I find them a pain in the ass to navigate, and most of the time they're riddled with spam anyway. Mailing lists, however, are a deal breaker for me.
Still, I think RedMine is *close* to being able to replace the current code base for GForge, and I've already mentioned this to Tom.
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