nil desperandum

I keep hearing various people espousing the joys of task management with Mylyn in Eclipse, so last week I thought I would take a look.Mylyn is easy to install. Just go into Eclipse's Help > Software Updates > Find and Install > Search for new features and add the Mylyn update server. You can find the details of the update server from the Eclipse Wiki When you're given a list of items to install make sure you include the option for the Trac Connector. A quick restart of Eclipse and you're ready to use Mylyn locally and in theory you should be able to add a task respository. If you're on a released version of Trac eg. 0.10.4 you should be able to simply create a repository that points at your Trac installation URL and away you go... With 0.11 Mylyn can't see trac as a valid repository. At this point I kept finding notes saying that you can't use Mylyn with Trac 0.11. I'd also noted from the Mylyn User Guide (link above) that I should be able to use an XML-RPC plugin, but look at this also seemed to suggest that there were problems and the examples look scary. Its actually very simple to set up, the examples are for the API if you want to build your own XML-RPC interfaces and it definately does work! If you've installed Trac 0.11, you should have installed the Python setuptools, so installing the XML-RPC plugin is really easy! easy_install http://trac-hacks.org/svn/xmlrpcplugin/trunk/ One thing to note - I used the trunk version of the plugin. The tagged version 0.10 doesn't work with Trac 0.11 Restart apache and thats it... What you'll need to do now is go into the plugin admin in trac web admin for the project you want to use as a task repository. You'll need to enable the following components in the tracxmlrpc plugin:

• XMLRPCSystem
• All the component with ".ticket" in the module name
• XMLRPCWeb

Give Apache a quick restart. Now when you setup a task repository in Mylyn in Eclipse, make sure you chose "XML-RPC Plugin (rev. 1950)" as the Access Type under Additional Settings. With a valid user name to access your repo, you're now ready to start building queries in the task list. I really like the interface that Mylyn gives you in eclipse. Now I need to play with all the extra options you get for planning and adding context. Only two bothers I've noticed so far:

1. I tried to add my queries into folders, but no matter how much I try they all just end up in the top level.
2. As I wrote this I noticed that actions in our custom workflow aren't showing up

UPDATE : As Don has noted below - to enable the components in the XMLRPC plug-in I recommend using the web admin. This is one of the other superb features of Trac 0.11 - webadmin built in already. No need to have to learn about plug-in when you're first starting with Trac. ;)