> the mailing list has become much less hostile and more supportive then.

Glad to hear that! Running an open project is hard.

> [...] switched again (ClearSilver -> Genshi -> Jinja)

Genshi was current when I used it; I wasn't aware it had switched to jinja (or it slipped my mind by now..)

> Lack of Milestone customization: I'm not sure I understand.

Back then, there were no custom fields for milestones, and the code didn't make it easy to do. Of course, this means you need changes to search facilities, and any other parts of the codebase. I had to write that also, and the target workflow was not at all complex.

As for the performance, we had about 20k tickets and 2k milestones when the system was replaced. By then it had been completely unusable for a long time.

Honestly, the only positives I have to say about Trac concern real-world usage by a hacker. Once you've learned it, and hacked it to your liking, it's very productive. But to get to that point, it's a sixty feet tall stack of ugly hacks, and frankly I would not recommend it to anyone...

Again to be clear, I did not look at the trac repo in many years, nor do I intend to.

Ah, I thought my ~300 milestones was pushing it. :)

I see. Milestones still have no custom fields. Did you ever send your customizations upstream?

No, unfortunately it was nowhere near good enough for that, it was just massacred to solve the problem.. Plus it was built on probably 20 patches from trac-hacks in the first place.

Very hard to find the time to upstream something like that when you are on a limited budget in the first place..

So "It seems not that many people have enough time and long-term interest in contributing significant improvements to such projects" wasn't that wrong. ;)