What's in this manual

The Razor manual is organized to lead you through a discovery process. If you read the manual in order, you will be led from acquiring the product distribution, through installation, usage, and finally to customization of Razor to meet your specific requirements. It is our hope that this organization will provide you with the most cost-effective learning experience. The manual is heavily cross-referenced so that it remains an excellent reference manual for even the most seasoned veteran. This document is divided into the following sections:

• Chapter 1 provides an overview of Razor, including some introductory thoughts on the general philosophy and approach used by the product.
• Chapter 2 outlines installation instructions and provides suggestions for general administration of the tool set. It's intended for whomever will be installing the product on your system.
• Chapters 3, 4, and 5 describe how to use the Razor trilogy, (the issues, versions and threads programs, respectively). These are discussed from the user's point of view, and do not get into the mechanics behind how everything is configured or implemented.
• Chapter 6 outlines the command line functionality of Razor, while Chapter 7 describes some special features, such as use of e-mail and synchronized problem tracking databases.
• Chapters 8 and 9 provide the details for customization and personalization of the Razor tool suite to better meet the requirements of your organization, including how to write your own shell scripts for working with the Razor database. These chapters are intended for the more advanced user or administrator of the tool.
• Appendices A and B outline the layout of Razor directories and the format of Razor files. These are nice resources for understanding the underpinnings of the tool.
• Appendix C provides information regarding X Resources and Appendix D provides a quick overview of regular expressions.
• Appendix E provides information regarding installation and use of Razor's PC client, Appendix F installation/use of the remote UNIX client, and Appendix G installation/use of the Windows NT server.
• Appendix H provides a potpourri of information regarding Razor; essentially whatever did not find a home above. Common questions get answered, environment variables get spelled out, and glyphs are shown.
• Following the appendices, you'll find the glossary and index.

The Razor documentation set

Razor comes with an extensive manual. It covers the full scope of the product, from installation and general use through heavy customization of the product. A companion manual exists for Razor's Web interface to issues called IssueWeaver®.

And, of course, there's a variety of supplemental documentation which comes along with the product. They'll be in the form of `README' files, release notes, comments within our scripts, and help screens accessible from the GUI.

Since Razor is highly customizable, we opted to keep specifics on how the product may be configured for various work environments out of this text.

NOTE: The screen images shown in this manual are simply examples. UNIX screen dumps were used, but the PC applications are remarkably similar. What you see at your site may be very different from the screens shown here. Razor is a highly configurable tool. For more information on how this is handled, see the "Customization & Personalization" chapter on page 183.

Other documents

It's often handy to have a well-stocked bookshelf to supplement the information presented in this document. Depending on your level of interest and expertise, we've found the following references to be particularly helpful.

• UNIX in a Nutshell and UNIX Power Tools, both from O'Reilly & Associates
• Multi-Platform Code Management and Managing Projects with Make, again from the people at O'Reilly.
• FAQ from the Usenet Newsgroup comp.software-eng
  FAQ from comp.software.config-mgmt

The two newsgroups mentioned above are useful not only for the static information provided as part of the FAQs, but also for the dynamic (and occasionally heated) discussions they contain regarding recommended practices and products for software engineering.