Project Management

Daniel Harmsworth

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Installing Mercurial

Initially I attempted to install Mercurial using the OSX Homebrew package manager wih the following command:
brew install mercurial
however the package in Homebrew is poorly maintained and was not functional, rather than installing manually I tried installing using the Python PIP system which succeeded.
pip install mercurial

Student Website Development

Given the rise of HTML5 and CSS3 I have opted to minimise the amount of JavaScript in my student site to the bare minimum as something of an exercise to familiarise myself with the new functionality implemented in these standards. Sublime Text OSX Screenshot

Development Environment

I have chosen to develop directly in HTML as opposed to using a WYSIWYG development tool. I have been making extensive use of the W3C HTML Validator and W3C CSS Validator to ensure that all of my hand-written code is fully compliant with the HTML5 and CSS3 specifications.
As for an editor, I am using Sublime Text, a code oriented text editor for OSX that provides code folding, syntax highlighting and predictive input for HTML. I have used Sublime Text extensively for development on several previous project as I find it does just enough to improve accuracy and speed whilst not 'getting in the way'.

Project Management Software

I am going to try using OpenProject, a serverside project management tool, this will be set up on the FabLab WA website at projects.fablabwa.org.

Gotchas

Mercurial & OSX Case Sensitivity

MacOSX uses HFS+ as its default filesystem and unlike the NTFS filesystem on Windows or the EXT3/4 and BTRFS filesystems commonly used on *nix it is a case insensitive filesystem. The result is the possiblity of encountering a case-folding collision error in Mercurial. This error occurs where a repository contains filenames that differ only in capitalisation, the host filesystem on OSX is unable to differentiate between these files.
To mitigate this issue my tactic was simply to create a second, small partition using the HFS+ Case-Sensitive variant and storing the Mercurial repository on this separate partition.