tech addict

Every time I have to document code or architecture in Word, I get upity. It's not that Word isn't good for creating documents, it is in fact great at creating nice looking documents. The problem is that code is a living creature, and word documents generally aren't. They are written and forgotten, filed away and lost. I generally envision the giant storage warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

So like many other developers I push for documentation via wiki. Depending on your environment this may hard to accomplish. If your lucky enough to be using subversion for version control, then you can just setup trac. Trac just happens to provide everything one would need for a lively quick moving project, a wiki, subversion browser, ticket management, and wiki syntax linking them all. The wiki-ticket integration is great for impromptu code reviews. Not to mention the RSS feeds with links to changesets.

So far trac has been a hit at every place I've worked. It takes a culture change, but it's worth it. Give it a try if you haven't already. If your coming from in-house sharepoint and sourcesafe pairings, it'll be a refreshing change.

I've been using subversion for quite some time on personal projects. I'd love to start using subversion at work as cvs over a samba share isn't quite kosher. The interesting part of this is that using file/folder properties you can have some simple bug tracking integration (mantis, trac, bugzilla, fogbugz). This comes in handy when you need to figure out why changes were done (this is exactly the type of information that the kde khtml devs wanted). The integration comes from third party UI's (like TortoiseSVN), not from subversion's own tools afaik, which means that cmd line integrated usage is out (at least until someone decides they want to add it).

Unfortunately there isn't a actively developed product like tortoise for osx, there is scplugin but I do not believe it is under development at this time. In addition I don't believe that svnX (another osx svn ui) has support for the bug tracker properties.