I don’t just use generative AI such as ChatGPT and Gemini for code prototyping, but at all stages of development, starting from analysis and all the way to test generation and even deployment. Very often, especially during the feasibility/analysis stage of product development, I find that an entire answer from our AI overlords is so good, that it can be copied verbatim into a ticket, as part of the analysis.

Chatbots output markdown, but Trac uses TracWiki as its markup format.

pandoc writers

There is no TracWiki writer for pandoc that I know of. Writers are lua scripts that you can use with pandoc to extend its output format capabilities. A writer simply tells pandoc how to output different typographic elements such as paragraph, list, code block, headings, etc.

ChatGPT is capable enough to create a rudimentary TracWiki writer for you, but it’s not perfect. It needs some manual work before it can be called complete. Paragraphs and lists are easy, but writing more complex elements, such as image links, requires some manual work. A fun side-project that I may get to at some time in the future.

ZimWiki ≈ TracWiki

But chatbots only output very basic markdown. A custom writer is not necessary for copying simple markdown from ChatGPT or Gemini to Trac. Instead, you can leverage the fact that the TracWiki markup format is very similar to ZimWiki. And pandoc has a built-in ZimWiki writer. (Incidentally both formats are similar to WikiCreole).

Online tool

There’s two ways to do this. The simplest one is to use the online tool for trying out pandoc:

https://pandoc.org/try

Just copy the markdown and paste it into the tool, select the output format to be zimwiki and click Convert.

Shell

You can also do this on the command line. If you have xclip installed, you can do it with the following one-liner that you can store as an alias:

alias md2trac="xclip -selection clipboard -o | pandoc --from markdown --to zimwiki --no-highlight | xclip -selection clipboard"

Now you can copy the markdown output from ChatGPT, run md2trac, then paste the clipboard contents directly into your Trac ticket or wiki page.

The post ⎘ Copying markdown from ChatGPT or Gemini to TracWiki using pandoc appeared first on Alexandros Georgiou.

Versions

On my Ubuntu 16 installation (let’s call it example1.com) I have a project on this version of trac:

$ lsb_release  -d
Description:    Ubuntu 16.10
$ tracd --version
tracd 1.0.12

I had good(-ish) reasons to migrate the entire project to a copy on an Ubuntu 10 machine.

$ lsb_release -d
Description:    Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS

Installing trac

These are the resources that you need to be aware of:

• https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracOnUbuntu
• https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/MySqlDb

I first installed trac via the old-releases.ubuntu.com repository.

$ sudo apt-get install trac

This installed an earlier version than the one I had.

$ tracd --version
tracd 0.11.7

Setting up the new (old) trac

Rather than upgrading the entire system with do-release-upgrade, I decided to work with this version.

You will need the python-mysqldb module on example2.com to access a MySQL database. If you’re using PostgreSQL the procedure should be similar. YMMV.

$ sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb

First, copy the assets of the project environment. This is a directory tree that you can copy over using rsync.

rsync -r example1.com:/path-to-trac-env example2.com:/path-to-trac-env

For simplicity we’ll keep everything the same: file directories, database name and database credentials, although you could change these. Your database settings are in the /path-to-trac-env/conf/trac.ini file. You want the database variable under the [trac] section, which should look something like:

[trac]

database = mysql://tracuser:tracpassword@localhost:3306/trac-env

You will want to create an empty MySQL database where your project will live. You will need the MySQL client on example2.com, so if you don’t have it, install it with:

sudo apt-get install mysql-client

You will then want to login as root

mysql -u root -p

and create the database, (using the utf8_bin collation)

CREATE DATABASE `trac-env` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;

and finally create the user:

GRANT ALL ON `trac-env`.* TO tracuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'tracpassword';

Exit the MySQL client with Ctrl-D and import a standard SQL dump of your database from example1.com. For instance, if you like one-liners, you might do this on example2.com:

ssh example1.com "mysqldump -u tracuser -ptracpassword --single-transaction trac-env | gzip -9" | zcat | mysql -u tracuser -ptracpassword trac-env

Nasty hack FTW

Now start tracd and visit the installation via your web browser. You should see an error like this:

 Trac detected an internal error:

ValueError: timestamp out of range for platform time_t

This is because all timestamps in this newer version of trac are in microseconds, rather than seconds. Here is a (somewhat) relevant ticket.

I went ahead and hacked the DB thusly:

update ignore attachment set time = floor( time / 10000000);
update ignore auth_cookie set time = floor( time / 10000000);
update ignore revision set time = floor( time / 10000000);
update ignore ticket set time = floor( time / 10000000);
update ignore ticket set changetime = floor( changetime / 10000000);
update ignore ticket_change set time = floor( time / 10000000);
update ignore version set time = floor( time / 10000000);
update ignore wiki set time = floor( time / 10000000);

These are all the timestamp columns in the DB. Dividing by a million converts millionths of a second to seconds and the floor function makes sure that the result is still an integer.

The ignore argument is there only because I had one single collision in one ticket comment. Needless to say, this is a nasty hack, so don’t rely on it too much.

But, for my purposes, “It Works”!

The post How to migrate trac MySQL-based project from trac 1.0.12 to trac 0.11.7 appeared first on Alexandros Georgiou.

Don’t forget to add the TracGit link

Who doesn’t use git? Nobody, that’s who. And who doesn’t use trac? Well, actually, a lot of people. Nowadays Joomla seems to be all the rage. But trac is pretty cool and I use it for all the things! TracGit lets you setup your git repos so that you can link to your source from the trac tickets and wiki pages.

As we all know by now, it’s a very, very good habit to link to your source changes when you close a ticket. In fact, I get to do that all the time. And whether it’s a single commit, or a merge from an entire branch of commits, it’s almost always the last change that you want to link to. So here’s a bash alias that gives you the exact trac syntax that you can copy from the shell and paste into your ticket.

alias git-trac='echo [changeset:$(git log -1 --format="%h")/$(basename $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel))];';

It’s nothing fancy, but I find myself using it all the time so I decided to share. Add it to your ~/.bashrc, or better yet, to ~/.bash_aliases, if you’re the organized type.

One less step…

If you’re anything like me, you’re way too busy to copy and paste stuff. If only you could skip one of those two steps and save valuable time…

Luckily, you can automate the copy to clipboard part! First install xclip:

sudo apt-get install xclip

Then, your alias becomes:

alias git-trac='echo [changeset:$(git log -1 --format="%h")/$(basename $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel))] | xclip -selection clipboard';

Unfortunately, you’ll have to paste the string into trac yourself. If you’re thinking about automating that part, well, then I’ve got to ask, what’s wrong with you?

The post Bash alias to create a TracGit link to your latest commit appeared first on Alexandros Georgiou.