Choice of Software for bug tracking/changes for Mathematica Application Package Development CVS Vs. Bugzilla?

3
votes

I am developing an application package in mathematica with workbench and it is starting to get complex with multpiple versions and components. I read in some mathematica documentation (http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/BuildingLargeSoftwareSystemsInMathematica.html Paragraph:Use Source Control ) that CVS was a good system, but I have checked it (http://www.nongnu.org/cvs/) and it does not seem to be under very active development and the download page is kind of cryptic.

Am I going to the wrong page for CVS? I just got this page http://ximbiot.com/cvs/wiki/Main%20Page#CVS_Downloads for CVS also, but no clear indication as to where to download

On a different project I managed many years ago, the developers used bugzilla and were quite happpy with it. I went to the bugzilla page and it seems to be a better choice (http://www.bugzilla.org/download/#howtoget).

Any advice from active Mathematica developers?

Or are both CVS and bugzilla complementary? In this case an indication of where to best get CVS with clearer installation and use instructions would be nice.

3
cvswolfram-mathematicatrackingbugzilla
A related question on version control in Mathematica notebooks. And I use git for most of my projects now. - Simon

3 Answers

3
votes

All very simple :

  1. download Eclipse, along with all the plugins you need (svn, cdt, texlipse, ...), from www.eclipse.org ;
  2. download Eclipse plugin for workbench from http://www.wolfram.com/services/premiersupport/workbench.cgi : you will have a choice between platforms : Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Eclipse;
  3. choose the last one (eclipse) and save the file somewhere;
  4. open Eclipse, then Help->Install New Software -> Add and browse to the location of the file you saved.
2
votes

I use the standalone Eclipse (not Workbench) + Mathematica plugin + SVN plugin and they all work perfectly together.

1
votes

Bugzilla and CVS, SVN or git do different jobs. Wikipedia has articles on both, eg SVN and Bugzilla. In brief (and assuming you're writing code alone and are not doing this collaboratively), SVN/CVS will be useful as purely versioning systems, ie, to keep older versions so as to be able to go back, check what has changed and keep a historical record, while Bugzilla is used to track bugs (I've never used it so that's all I know about it).

Perhaps if you give more details on what it is you'd like to achieve it'll be easier to suggest something. For what it is worth, I use SVN for version control, but I don't think it integrates with the Workbench at all (I do commits etc from the command line usually).