News and Updates

The SQLAlchemy project is now using Bitbucket for all issue tracking and wiki pages.

SQLAlchemy began using Bitbucket some years ago for pull requests, and then when the move to Git was made, Bitbucket became the originating point for the git main, which remains mirrored on SQLAlchemy's host as well as on Github. However, the issue system has for SQLAlchemy's entire life remained hosted on Trac.

A move from Trac to another system like Github or Bitbucket was not feasable until Bitbucket added an advanced import/export feature which could maintain the full history, timestamps, and user accounts of the imported issues. When this feature was introduced, the SQLAlchemy project still was reluctant to give up full control over its issue tracker, instead enabling full user account tools and adding such features as tracvatar (used by the Fedora project!) to improve the user interface. But ultimately spammers started abusing the system, and the spam tools provided with Trac were failing to deter them in any way, and more generally didn't seem to work at all; an alternate plugin was installed to provide captcha support to the registration page, but spam accounts continued to register daily despite it. The account database in Trac amassed several hundred accounts, mostly inactive, any number of which might also be spam accounts. As the SQLAlchemy project has no interest being in the business of maintaining user account databases, the impetus to move became clear. An additional advantage is that the issue system is no longer throttled to crawlers, who were also a nuisance on SQLAlchemy's very low power host.

After two weeks of effort to produce import/export tools as well as to develop various utilities and workarounds for some issues encountered with Bitbucket (most notably, that its system marks every issue and comment not owned by you as spam after an import is done, meaning you have to un-mark them all), the issue system has been moved entirely. SQLAlchemy's host is now used to serve the main website and for the Jenkins main (which is also non-public to deter crawlers from slowing it down).