Managing Projects with Perl

[Tom Hukins]

Imagine this:  you find yourself in a new job with no version control,
minimal documentation (mostly outdated), and no formal bug tracking
system.

In this hypothetical world, you might introduce Subversion, with the
support of a colleague who also values version control.  You might
find you also have an internal bug tracking system that nobody uses
because it's a little clunky.  But you persuade them to use it more.

You think that a Wiki would help with documentation.  You acknowledge
you'll have to persuade people to use it, but recognise this as a
non-technical problem.  And you're happy with that.

A few months later you might find yourself discussing this with
various people who happen to subscribe to a certain mailing list.
Just maybe.  And later you might decide to post to that list.

And you might happily run Subversion; you might like Mediawiki's
interface; and you might appreciate that some strange bug tracker is
better than nothing.  But you still miss RT.

But you feel a little uncomfortable that the tools you like weren't
designed to integrate.  You look at trac and envy the way it
integrates issue tracking, Wikis and version control with the same
Python envy that causes us all to use Mailman.  trac looks really
nice, but it's not Perl.

Imagine you could write rt#1234 in your Subversion commit log or your
Wiki, and your tools recognised this as a ticket number and
automatically linked to it.  Imagine your bug tracker recognised
WikiWords and automatically linked to ThingsLikeThis in your Wiki.

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?

Not that I actually care and this is a real problem I'm trying to
tackle or anything.  Of course.  Obviously.

Tom