Book Image

Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion

By : David J Murphy
Book Image

Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion

By: David J Murphy

Overview of this book

<p><br />Trac is a minimalistic open-source enhanced wiki and bug/issue tracking system for software development projects, designed to help developers while staying out of the way and provides an interface to Subversion. Subversion is an open-source version control system that addresses many of the perceived deficiencies of CVS and can use WebDAV for network communications, and the Apache web server to provide repository-side network service.<br /><br />This book presents a simple set of processes and practices that allow you to manage these projects using open-source software without getting in the way by imposing as little as possible on established development practices and policies.<br /><br />This book looks at what is needed to manage software development projects, how web-based software project management system Trac and open-source revision control system Subversion meet these needs, and how to install, configure, and use them.</p> <p><a href="http://www.packtpub.com/article/managing-software-development-with-trac-and-subversion-table-of-contents"><br /></a></p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Making Documentation Easy


One of the reasons Trac works so well for managing software development is because it is browser based. Apart from our development environment, the browser, along with our email client, are the next most likely applications we are going to have installed and running on our computer. If access to our Trac environment is only a click away, it stands to reason that we are more likely to use it.

In Chapter 2 we referred to Trac as a "wiki on steroids" because of the way the developers have integrated the typical features of a wiki throughout the whole product. However, for all the extra features and integration, at its heart Trac is basically just a wiki and this is the main reason why it so useful in helping smooth the documentation process. If we again recall Chapter 2, we described a wiki:

Note

A wiki is a web application that allows visitors to create and modify its content.

Let's expand on that slightly. As well as letting us view content—like a normal website—a wiki...