Subversion Clients

Note: Since August 2011 this page is out of date for WarFoundry. The advice still holds, but we no longer use Subversion.

The following is a brief description of some of the tools you can use to check code out from the Subversion source control repository and to commit your changes. Some developers will already have their own favourite tool and some IDEs already come with Subversion plugins, but others can charge a not inconsiderable fee for such a basic feature.

Integrated in your IDE

SVN in MonoDevelop

If you are using MonoDevelop then integrated subversion is already built-in through the supplied plugins. If the plugin is disabled then check that the Subversion client executable is installed on your computer. MonoDevelop will write a warning to the console if the plugin is enabled but it can't find the subversion executable, but not warn you through the GUI. Once MonoDevelop can see the subversion executable you should have a "Checkout" menu item under the "File" menu. Note: Under versions of Ubuntu, you will also need to install the monodevelop-versioncontrol package before you will even have the option to "Checkout" under the MonoDevelop "File" menu.

SVN in Visual Studio

There are several SVN plugins for Visual Studio, but they all seem to have a price tag and aren't compatible with Visual Studio Express editions. This is part of Microsoft's general tactic of getting people used to core functionality and then get the money when they want advanced functionality. The easiest solution (if you don't already have a full copy of Visual Studio) is to use an external SVN client.

SVN in SharpDevelop

SharpDevelop (an open-source IDE for Windows that MonoDevelop branched from) apparently contains Subversion support via TortoiseSVN. This has not been tested or examined, but should work.

External SVN clients

If your development environment doesn't include SVN integration then the only alternative is an external client. There are lots of clients for all OSes, or there's the classic fall-back of the command-line tools.

External GUI SVN Clients

The most popular client for Windows seems to be TortoiseSVN, while most Linux developers tend to have development environments that include source control as a core feature. For those Linux apps that don't there is RapidSVN, eSVN or QSVN as the main options.

On a personal note, IBBoard currently uses eSVN on Linux because of its concept of "workspaces" of projects, "changes in this folder" indicators and the remote copy/move feature (useful for creating tags/branches). QSvn is a close contender as it uses Qt4 and so looks like a native GTK app in Gnome, but fails on the remote copy and nested change markers, the same as the 'official' RapidSVN client (which uses wxWidgets and so looks even more native in Gnome).

SVN from the command-line

The brave can always use SVN from the command-line. While it does have its uses, it's not generally advised for long-term use. Command-line arguments and usage instructions can be found in the SVN book at Red-bean.com.

Last modified 8 years ago Last modified on 08/17/11 20:16:05