Software Construction and Management Tools

Software Building

• GNU Make - the best make in town! An implementation of make with many enhancements and some parallelization. There's a drop-in replacement for it written in Perl called Makepp.
• Cook - a make replacement with variables, user-defined functions, parallelisation, file checksums, and other powerful features.
• CONS - a make replacement written in Perl with file checksums and other features. SCons is a Python version, that has been more actively maintained recently.
• Ant - a make replacement written in Java that uses an XML description language.

Links to Lists, Comparisons and Other Resources

• Google's Web Directory for Make Tools - contains other useful links.
• A-A-P Build Tools List - A very comprehensive list of build tools.
• The Wikipedia Entry for Make - contains a list of alternatives.
• A Google Spreadsheet with a Comparison of various Alternatives

Software Pre-building Configuration

• GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool: a trio of programs to portably build applications across multiple UNIX platforms. The de-facto standard in the open-source world, but very kludgy and cause many problems.
• Imake - a portability tool that ships with X11. Old and deprecated.
• CMake - a generator for cross-platform makefiles, not unlike Autoconf, but works much better. Actively used by KDE starting from version 4 and by many other projects.
• QEF - a high-level software construction system. Operates consistently across UNIX and Windows NT platforms. Proprietary.
• SCons can be used for writing such configuration tasks as well.

Software Packaging

• RPM - a package management system used on RedHat Linux and other RPM-based distributions. Also look at urpmi, yum, and apt-rpm, which install packages and resolve dependencies.
• dpkg - The Debian Package Manager, which is also used on similar distributions. Also look at Apt which automatically installs packages and resolves dependencies.
• Portage - The Gentoo Package Manager - a package management system for Gentoo Linux. Akin to the BSD ports but based on Python.
• OpenPKG - a cross-platform UNIX software packaging system.

Source Control Managament Systems

• CVS - the old standard of open-source source control systems. Functional and stable, but limited in many ways. (GPLed).
• Subversion - a CVS replacement with atomic commits, networking over HTTP, efficient handling of binary file and other features. Still mostly a client/server, centralised protocol, but much more reliable than CVS and works better. (Apache/BSD Licence).
• Git - a version control system originally designed for the Linux kernel. Very fast and 100% distributed, but has some user-interface idiosyncracies, a complex command-set, and lacks good documentation.

Links to Lists, Comparisons and Other Resources

• The Better-SCM Site - a site for comparison and advocacy of Version Control Systems. (Maintained by Shlomi Fish, who also originated this page and site.) Contains a comparison.
• Wikipedia Comparison of Revision Control Systems
• Dmoz.org's Category for Version Control Systems - contains links to many other implementations and resources. The Google Directory's equivalent directory may also prove helpful..

Bug Tracking

Note: Due to the large number of such systems, I decided to link only to very prominent open-source ones, and to directories where comprehensive lists can be found.

• Bugzilla - a WWW-based bug management system written as part of the Mozilla project with many advanced features.
• GNATS - The GNU Bug Tracking System, which uses Plaintext files to store its information and has several front-ends.
• GForge - The open-source derivative of the original VA SourceForge codebase contains a rudimentary bug-tracking system as part of the many web-based collaborative services it offers for developers.
• Mantis - An open-source PHP/MySQL web-based bug tracking system.
• Trac - a wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Written in Python and based on Subversion.
• Request Tracker - "RT is an enterprise-grade ticketing system which enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users.". Among else, it is used for tracking CPAN issues.
• Google's Web Directory Bug Tracking Category - contains links to many other implementations.
• DMoz Bug Tracking - a perhaps more updated version of the same resource, with slower access times, and lack of Google's PageRank integration.

Testing Frameworks

• DejaGNU - a testing framework by the GNU project based on Tcl and Expect.
• XUnit - A testing framework that was suggested by Extreme Programming.
• TET - A cross-platform testing framework by the Open Group.
• The "Test Anything Protocol" (TAP) - a protocol for test scripts to communicate the results of their tests to the harness/consumer. Allows for heterogeneous test suites written in several languages.