At Netrino, we absolutely adore Trac. All of our engineering teams use Trac (along with Subversion) to manage projects and track changes to their schematics, source code, and other documents.

In fact, we have a lot of simultaneous projects–each with a separate Trac home. Since we’re hosting on the Internet rather than internally and have a different mix of engineers on each project, though, we must use authentication. In a nutshell, it’s first necessary to login with a username and password before you can view or edit any of Trac’s wiki, milestones, tickets, etc.

We love RSS too at Netrino. So it’s nifty that Trac supports RSS and can spit out a Timeline view of events via RSS. Ideally, those of us with roles in multiple projects could just track events via per-project RSS feeds.

Unfortunately, we’ve found no RSS reader that can perform the necessary login step, via for example the /login URL, prior to accessing the feed. For Mac there’s even one RSS client (Rss Growler) that claims to have been written specifically for use with Trac–but it can’t login first either.

Digging for hours for an answer to this riddle, I discovered that the issue has been known in the Trac community for more than three years. Despite a long series of discussions, Ticket #540 remains open with no end in sight! Is this the best the open source community can do? (The very first comment, dating to June 2004, offers a reasonable-sounding solution that would work for most TracRSS users.)