Monday, October 4, 2010

Subversion Clients on Mac OS

For Java development always use the eclipse subversive svn plugin.

Today i evaluated other svn clients for mac os. Of course there is the command line client svn. But that is not always comfortable. So let us have a look at different gui frontends for subversion.
 
The Textmate Subversion Bundle 

Textmate is my favorite text-editor for Mac OS. Textmate is a commercial tool which costs nearly 50 euros but it has so many useful features that i think it is worth the money if you are using your mac as a development machine.

The subversion bundle can be used to check out a project from a subversion repository and to work with the files from the project. It offers basic support for the add, remove, commit, diff, info and merge commands. Even the blame command is supported.
The Textmate blame window

The Subversion context menu in Textmate


As you can see the Textmate subversion bundle allows you to work with files in a working copy. But there is no support for importing projects to a repository or to create tags using the copy command. 

Conclusion:
Given this feature set, the subversion bundle is an option if you are developing using Textmate. But you will need another tool for the administration of the repository.

Finder Integration with SCPlugin

The SCPlugin aims to offer finder integration for subversion. The current version is 0.8.2. The SCPlugin project claims to support Snow Lepopard. I followed the installation posted here, but the plugin does not work for me. I can use the svn actions but i do not get icons that show the state of the files in my working copy. Did anyone get this to work? 

Conclusion:
For me SCPlugin seems rather useless.

SvnX

SnvX is a free standalone gui tool for subversion. It offers support for most of the svn client commands. It supports both managing files in your working copy and managing your repository.

The SvnX Gui

Conclusion:
This tool is the opposite of the Textmate subversion bundle: Repository administration works pretty good with this tool, managing a working copy is partially supported but not very comfortable.



Commercial SVN Clients

Besides the tools menitoned above there exists a range of commercial SVN clients. Since i do not want to pay for an snv client i did not evaluate them. Below is a list of commercial svn clients for Mac OS:


Summary

Despite the fact that subversion is being used productively for many years now the support for svn in Mac OS is not very good if you do not want to buy a commercial client app. I will continue using a combination of the command line client, svnx, textmate and eclipse. There is no suitable all in one solution for me. 

Do you have better solution?

4 comments:

  1. SCPlugin states on their page that contextual menus on Snow Leopard are not supported. They are at a version from February 2010 -- development seems to have stalled. What a pity, because it looked to be a good equivalent to TortoiseSVN on Windows.

    svnX works well for me to the point of not needing anything else. Development seems to be progressing, with the latest release supporting properties. Power users may find commercial applications giving them something addition to this, though I cannot see why.

    In summary, with just a bit of time to understand the tool, you can do subversion via a UI on Mac for free and quiet nicely with svnX.

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  2. SCPlugin works fine, the only problem is---as already stated above---that the contextual finder integration does not work. Neither do the overlay badges for indicating the update status of a folder.
    Nevertheless, still my choice for synching my work, as I don't want to use an additional app...

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  3. yeah...uh ha... well well. I reckon .. hmmmm.... sure sure.

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  4. If you are looking for the simple SvnClient for MacOSX integrated with file management try CRAX: http://www.ewas.pl/crax/

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