I did some debugging.
The problem is that inside _get_functions(self): the cmd string gets set to "\"close\"" instead of "close".
These additional " cause my problem. I guess the problem is caused by Python 2.7.3rc2, used by debian wheezy.
As a workaround i added one line to /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tracopt/ticket/commit_updater.py : _parse_message()
func = functions.get(cmd.lower())
+ if not func: func = functions.get("\"%s\""%cmd.lower())
if not func and self.commands_refs.strip() == '<ALL>':
You also need to remove the commit_update.pyc file and restart apache.