Managing Projects with Perl

Nik Clayton nik at ngo.org.uk
Mon Dec 5 09:35:06 PST 2005


On 1 Dec 2005, at 23:40, Tom Hukins wrote:
> Imagine this:  you find yourself in a new job with no version control,
> minimal documentation (mostly outdated), and no formal bug tracking
> system.

[...]

> What would you do?  Would you install trac?  Would you try to tie
> together RT with SVN::Web (hoping you can bribe its maintainer with
> oriental buffets when required) and some sort of Wiki that doesn't
> exist (I hate Kwiki: it has horrible edge cases) or would you accept
> that this particular holy trinity was never meant to integrate?
>
> Or would you do something else?

If you've got a single project, and trac does everything you want, then 
trac is probably the best way to go.  That also assumes that either you 
don't want to extend it, or, if you do, you're familiar with Python.

trac gets a lot of things right, but it's not designed to support 
multiple projects out of a single Subversion repo (although newer 
releases get close), and it's (deliberately) not intended to be an 
all-singing all-dancing system.

And, of course, because everything's so tightly integrated, it's 
difficult to pull one piece out and replace it with another...

Being of the opinion that it's better to have loosely coupled 
components that work well together than a single monolithic whole, 
SVN::Web tries to play nicely with others.  That's why newer versions 
make it much easier for whoever's setting it up to have keywords in 
commit messages be turned in to links.  See here, for an example:

    
http://jc.ngo.org.uk/~nik/cgi-bin/svnweb/index.cgi/jc/revision/?rev=534

There's no reason why (for example) you couldn't have the log messages 
pass through a WikiText recogniser, so that WikiWords become links to 
your local wiki implementation too.

I imagine it wouldn't be too much work to take any open source wiki and 
change the parser so that (to use trac syntax)

     source:/some/path/in/your/repo

or

     source:/some/path/in/your/repo at 123

became links back to an SVN::Web installation.  I share your distaste 
for Kwiki, and haven't yet found a wiki that I really like.  Sitting 
down and writing an articulate description of the shortcomings in wikis 
(so I can use it as a jumping off point for writing something better, 
or enhancing an existing one) has been on my todo list for some time.

Something that looks interesting, although I've not done anything with 
it beyond peruse the manual, is scmbug, http://www.mkgnu.net/?q=scmbug. 
  The manual is at 
http://files.mkgnu.net/files/scmbug/doc/latest_manual/html/index.html.

N
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