# Introduction

## About this manual

This manual is probably obsolete in many parts, as it has unfortunately not been updated as frequently as the source code.

This manual groups several guides bundled together into one single document: , , and . Each guide is intended for a particular audience, and is also available separately.

### Copyright and license

This manual is copyrighted by the different authors and released under a FIXME license

## About FusionForge

FusionForge is a software for collaborative development for the software community. It provides a full configured development system with versioning, a project web site and tools for communication between members of a development team. The tools provided by FusionForge allows team members to communicate and organize their work; this allows the creation of a knowledgebase.

A complete configurated FusionForge system will give you the following features :

1. A Web site for every project

2. Versioning via CVS or Subversion

3. Shell access to the server for the developers

4. A web site for project coordination and comunication between team members:

   1. Discussion Forums - For discussions between team members

   2. Bug tracking - Allow registration and administration of bugs

   3. Support requests, patch submissions, and enhancement requests

   4. Comunication between project members using mailing lists

   5. Sharing of documentation

   6. Handling of todo lists, tasks, etc

   7. File uploads/releases

   8. Posting of news - Every project can have its own news items.

   9. Code Snippets - Provides of a basic knowledgebase that can contain code fragments, HOWTOs, etc.

The tasks and the tracker items (to track bugs, patches, support requests, enhancement requests) can be classified using status, priority, category.

The system provides also a classification system of the projects, a user profile, and a user rating system.

## FusionForge History

To avoid confusion with the proprietary versions of GForge (known as GForge Advanced Server, GForge Express Edition and GForge Community Edition), the free/libre/opensource codebase was renamed/forked, to be separately maintained under the name FusionForge by the main developers of the free GForge 4.x codebase.

GForge was itself a fork of the 2.61 SourceForge code, which was only available via anonymous CVS from VA (Research|Linux|Software). Since VA had not released the source in over one year, despite their promises to the contrary, a fork was necessary to ensure a viable open source version of the codebase. The GForge project was formed and maintained by Tim Perdue, the original author of much of the original SourceForge web code.