At work, we are outfitted with Windows servers. Despite this obstacle, I managed to install Trac and Subversion a few years ago. During a break in the action, we decided to update Subversion (SVN) and Trac. Since we are on Windows, this means we have to rely on the kindness of strangers for Subversion binaries. I ran into a couple of gotchas I'd like to document here to help anyone else who runs into these.

I managed to get Subversion and Trac up and running without any real problems. However when Trac needed to access SVN to display changesets or a timeline, for example, I got an error:

tracerror: unsupported version control system "svn" no module named _fs

After some googling, I finally found that this issue is documented on the Trac wiki, but it was kind of hard to find. To fix this problem, you have to rename the Python SVN binding's DLLs to *.pyd. Specifically, change the libsvn/*.dll files to libsvn/*.pyd, but don't change the name of libsvn_swig_py-1.dll. I'd really like to hear an explanation of why one needs to do this. Why doesn't the Python-Windows build process do this for you?

The second problem I ran into dealt with mod_wsgi on Windows. Originally, a few years ago, I setup Trac to run under mod_python. mod_python has long been out of favor, so I decided to cut over to mod_wsgi. On my Linux boxes, I always run mod_wsgi in daemon mode. When I tried to configure this on Windows, Apache complained about an unknown directive WSGIDaemonProcess. It turns out that this mode is not supported on Windows. You'll have to use the embedded mode on Windows.