Redmine

I'm not sure how others do it but generally, you want to use the right tools for the right job. In our world, we use Redmine (previously Trac) as the starting point of everything. For CTO's (and managers), checking out source code is "too much", I use Redmine subversion viewer to look around if I need to.

So, in your case, all documentation should be in the wiki and the wiki can link back to a particular source code (again, using the web viewer). Developers who are working on source code and need more than one paragraph of documentation usually will then have a link back to the wiki inside the comments area.

Storing documentation (beside a simple "how to build") makes the checkout process slower and basically hides any meaningful documentation to the rest of the organization besides people who know how to check out source code. I have had business people go in and change things on the wiki (mostly adding and reviewing developer notes) directly and it becomes a "living spec" (you can use the history to make sure it doesn't get out of control like feature creep).

If you are using Eclipse or something similar, you can Mylyn to integrate Redmine into your IDE.

Thanks Chris,

I believe my infamiliarity with svn, wikis, and release mgmt items is what is causing my most confusion so everyone bear with me. Your point with mgmt and others not wanting to check items's out is what I'm trying to grasp how to handle. For illustration purposes, take a simple user's guide that undergoes ongoing updates by one or more individuals. Ideally there would be a link on the project's Documentation page in Redmine which would always download the latest revision of the UG. Seems to me, as it is, I would have to manually upload the latest UG each time a change is made. Is that correct?

On a similar note, how about release mgmt where binaries are considered. For instance, how is everyone currently using Redmine to ensure someone who visits the project's pages can simply download latest/greatest builds without having to worry about checking things out and compiling locally? Is this too typically compiled locally and manually uploaded into Redmine for use?

If I were you, I would do the following:

1) keep the user guide in redmine and break it up into different sections. I would then write a script to build these wiki pages into something that can be dumped out to a PDF file.

Otherwise, you have to upload the user guide inside source control (svn). On the redmine wiki (front page), just put a link to that user guide that is checked into svn IF your developer is maintaining it. If another person is maintaining this (not working with svn, the person either has to upload it all the time in the documents area or learn SVN. If it is in svn, you can have a nice history too.

2) for binaries, redmine is not a build system. You have to use either
capistrano (does releases too)
cruisecontrol or
roll your own script with a cron job
google for continuous integration

once your build bot publishes your binaries to a known URL, put that link into te redmine wiki. You probably want to publish a dated version and copy it on top of the old "named" file name that redmine is expecting