MoinMoin is a Wiki program that I have used and enjoyed. It has the particular advantage of NOT requiring a database to store it's data in. It also provides "subpages" which is a feature I use a lot in categorizing stuff and splitting pages of related information up logically. And it keeps old versions of pages, which I require. The newest version distinguishes itself by having a new and improved version of the FCKEditor 2.6.3 JavaScript GUI editor.

I like what I see in Bugzilla 3.2. I will itemize the things I find interesting.

Skins:
Bugzilla's got Skins!

Changelists

One of the reasons people like Perforce's P4 is that it has changelists. You can add some files to a changelist, and other files to another changelist, then check in one changelist when you are ready, and not the other.

Now, in Subversion 1.5, you can do the same thing.

Have you seen a situation where Subversion needs to be accessible on a couple of different continents? Checkout of a few files, or an update with no changes, takes at least several seconds, call it 10, when your server is on the other continent. The following notes in the Release Notes show that this may be fixable now.

From the Subversion 1.5 Release Notes:

If you have ant installed, and it runs at all, it means you have java installed. If, however, you are on a Debian-based system, you may still get the error that says "tools.jar" is missing.

It turns out this means you need some more ant stuff installed.

Try the following:

-> sudo apt-get install java-gcj-compat-dev

This will probably install several packages that it requires. One of them provides tools.jar, or some reasonable facsimile. It let me run Ant without errors anyway.

I use a wiki to record procedures, processes, configuration information, and other info I need to track in working with build systems and databases. I think my use is typical of any IT department or software development department. Of the two most popular wikis in corporate environments, I prefer TWiki to Mediawiki (of Wikipedia fame) because of its "breadcrumb trails". Let's look first at more basic needs in a wiki.

While searching for Ant ways to loop over a bunch of builds and do the same thing to each, I recently had a look at Ant 1.7. It has been out for over a year, so it may show up in distros ant time now. Debian will have it in "sid", or you can use it from "sid" unstable now if you need it.

I also found out some interesting Ant tasks: <foreach> and <cc>, and the Ant subprojects Antlibs and Ivy.

There are a lot of people out there who would like to do code review at their company, but there is no time for the meetings. Now there are several software products that allow you to do the code review without the meetings.

Codestriker is a a free open source product, that allows you to ask reviewers to look at your code. You upload a diff file to a web page and list who you want to do the review, and optionally what Bugzilla bugID is relevant. They reply by web forms. You resolve the bug, or not, in the code review. The result is posted to the Bugzilla bug.

Microsoft has agreed to disclose some of its server protocols to Samba (and other Free Software projects?), through PFIF, a corporation.

I use Samba software all the time to communicate with Windows from Linux, both in making files available to users, and in build processes.

More info at Samba, and in commentary by Andrew Tridgell, creator of Samba.

The Bugzilla project has recently discussed whether to continue writing Bugzilla in Perl. As far as I can tell, they are not likely to abandon Perl, but there was discussion about what language would be best.

I am mentioning this because Build Systems have some of the same characteristics as Bugzilla: