Now that we have understood the problems that make managing software development difficult to the uninitiated, and have discussed the methods we are going to use to make our lives easier, it is time to meet the software that is going to enable us to put these methods into practice. In addition to introducing the software packages we will also look at how they work together to provide the overall solution.
It should be no surprise (especially considering the title of this book!) that Trac and Subversion are the key players in our solution, and they provide a good chunk of the functionality that we need. What may come as a surprise is that for the solution to really meet our needs there needs to be a third player—the Apache web server. There is also a fourth part, WebDAV, which we implement via an Apache module, and hence could be considered to have only a supporting role; but we will see later that it does contribute to the overall solution...