I realize that my previous message was slightly inflammatory. In an effort to be constructive, here is my minimum set of requirements for any project development system: 1. The source code should be represented as plain ASCII files. 2. All required actions must be automatable. Corollaries to requirement 1: you can edit source files with your favorite editor, diff them, and store them in your favorite source code control package. By "source code" I mean all the information you create for your project: C, Python, HTML, documentation, whatever. If there is meta-data that is required to make your project work, it should be stored in a human-readable form as well. An example of this might be permissions on files, which would be stored in the form of a Makefile rule that sets the permissions.. Corollaries to requirement 2: you must be able to build and maintain your project with command-line tools. Being able to use a GUI or a web page to do things is great, but there is no substitute for the UNIX way. Windows NT is a good counter-example to this rule. Here are some examples of project tasks that are facilitated by these basic two requirements: - I want to be able to take a snapshot of my whole project that I can roll back to at a future date. - I want one team of people to work on part of the project independently without clobbering what another team is doing. - I need to look at the diffs between yesterday's version of the project and today's version to figure out what person X did. - I want to set up an automated task to check out the latest version of the project from source control and build it on a test machine. Having said all this, there are times when I break my own rules. I am using a GUI builder right now that creates a binary file describing the UI component layouts for a window. I'd rather it represented the data in an ASCII format, but it's sufficiently useful that I'll put up with it. Also, each window is stored in a separate file, so that tends to limit the possibility of two people needing to change the same file at the same time. Your mileage may vary, of course. But I have found these principles to be useful. --Curtis