[coyotos-dev] Documentation: CMS or SCM?

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Sun, 2007-09-02 at 02:44 +0100, David Hopwood wrote:
> It sounds like what you want is a CMS integrated with an SCM. The most
> comprehensive open-source example of that I'm aware of (I assume we want
> open source?) is Trac: <http://trac.edgewall.org/>

First, Trac is not an SCM. It is a wiki integrated with a bug tracker.
It has some degree of ability to integrate with SVN, but it is not an
SCM in and of itself.

Second, Trac is what we initially tried, and we concluded that it is
hopelessly inadequate for our needs. The bug tracking model does not
incorporate the notion of a product with multiple components. The wiki
is fast and simple, but probably too simple for our needs.

> Alternatively, there is standalone wiki software that uses an SCM for
> page storage. (When I asked the wizard at www.wikimatrix.org about this,
> it suggested JSPWiki, KeheiWiki, MoniWiki, PhpWiki and TWiki.)

All of these are things that I have looked at in the past at various
times. In spite of their flaws, I think we will stick with Drupal for
now -- we need to move forward, and the whole "choose a wiki" issue took
far too much time.

> Storing lots of content in a wiki markup language does bother me a
> little because there are no standards, and every such language is
> slightly different.

I agree, though translating in and out is not that difficult. One
positive point about Drupal is that its preferred markup language is
[X]HTML.

> You mentioned the requirement to generate printed docs...

This functionality used to exist in Drupal and rotted.

More in a sec.


shap