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Essential Startup Software Development Infrastructure - 2007 Edition

A while back, I had done some research into what I would do at this point to set up again the basic software development infrastructure for a new startup project - with hindsight and the state of open-source development tools of ca 2007. Again the goal of the experiment is to spend little or no money, use only free and open-source software and end up with a solution which could be set up from scratch in only a few days.

Here are the basic choices of the 2007 edition software development infrastructure (to be elaborated in future posts):
  • The entire development support infrastructure should again be able to run on a single machine. For the experiment, I used my home server running Sabayon Linux a more user friendly version of the Gentoo source based Linux distribution. We assume that this machine is behind a firewall and cannot be accessed from the outside.
  • As the version control system, I chose Subversion (svn). Svn is mature, stable, well supported and largely accepted to be the natural replacement for CVS as the dominant open-source SCM. This is a deliberately conservative choice - since there is nothing as important and critical in the development support infrastructure as the SCM. Much of the ongoing innovation is in distributed SCM, but since I am most familiar with the centralized model, I know that svn will work and I assume there is no time for trialing and evaluation - so svn it is.
  • The overall frame of the infrastructure is provided by Trac. It wraps nicely around svn and provides a few important and well-integrated services out of the box, with little or no configuration:
    • Web based browser for Subversion repository, including change-sets.
    • Simple Wiki for organizing links and documentation
    • Bug/issue tracking ticketing system
    • Automated wiki style linkage between all subsystems of Trac referencing wiki pages, tickets and svn change-set numbers anywhere in pages, tickets or svn checkin comments.
    • Event time-line covering updates to wiki pages, issue tickets or svn checkins.
  • For the e-mail subsystem, we use the Postfix server, which is generally accepted as a more secure and administrator friendly replacement for the old sendmail. To implement a complete "closed-circuit" mail service, we use the Dovecot POP & IMAP server to provide access to the mail stored on the server to any e-mail client supporting these protocols.
  • To support mailing lists, we can simply use mail aliases provided by Postfix - in combination with MHonarc for managing the web archives.
  • From the original list, I am deliberately ignoring build and test automation. Not because it is not important, but because it more than others depends on the particularities of the project, may require some more significant setup and most from experience at least its own dedicated machine, if not a whole cluster of them. If possible, we would like a solution, which integrates nicely with Trac - e.g. Bitten.
For the setup and configuration, I am trying to keep things as simple as possible. Use defaults wherever possible and maybe even choose tools, just because they seem simpler to set up and configure. Most likely we can assume that the initial setup would be done by somebody who is a member of the development team, with limited system administration experience like myself and that there might be no professional system administrator around to help.