Discuss: I Wonder What This Button Does
by Mike West
- Editorial Comments
22 SVN Clients for OSX
I’m a relatively new user of SVN, and my favorite way to use it in Windows is Tortoise (mentioned already), which integrates SVN into the Windows GUI with contextual menus, etc.
Alas, there is nothing quite as good as Tortoise for OSX, but SCPlugin comes pretty close. Finder integration, file status badging, etc. It doesn’t support every feature, but includes most that you will use on a daily basis.
Also, I wanted to note that BBEdit has fantastic SVN support.
posted at 09:05 pm on July 26, 2006 by John-Paul Walton
23 re: Most stable GUI for the Mac?
Danny, looks like we were posting about this at the same time. Just wanted to add that with SCPlugin, I have not had hangups during checkout.
posted at 09:07 pm on July 26, 2006 by John-Paul Walton
24 Re: everything
Rick: First, I agree with you about the article title. It sounded light and fun when I wrote it, but it does turn out to be less than informative as to the article’s content. Next time, I’ll think about it a little harder (and I do hope there’s a next time… :) ).
Second, the hooks that Subversion provides are nothing short of brilliant. I hadn’t thought about using them to automatically deploy based on tags, but it’s a wonderfully simple concept! I’d take it a step further, and perhaps define certain types of tags that would auto-deploy to distinguish tagging a certain point in development (e.g. “ALMOST-DONE-WITH-2.1”) from tagging a release (e.g. “RELEASE-2.1”).
Andreas: Moving files and directories is the main reason I switched from CVS to Subversion a year or two ago. You’re absolutely correct in saying that being able to easily keep the contextual revision information without needing to remember that this file used to be that other file is stunningly valuable.
Flavio: The WebDAV interface is a nice feature, especially when used on a repository that’s set the SVNAutoversion property. There’s even a movie demonstrating that feature if you can believe it. It negates a little bit of the contextual benefit, since saving a file via WebDAV doesn’t offer the chance to add a useful message along with your commit, but you can get around that to some extent through judicious use of tags.
Danny: The Finder plugin that John-Paul mentions is an option that kinda sorta resembles TortiseSVN. It isn’t quite as elegant, but it’s better than nothing. I’m hoping that others will contribute some GUI ideas, because I’m strangely in love with the command line and don’t have much visibility into the pretty tools that other people run off with. :)
John-Paul: You’re right, BBEdit supports SVN quite well, as does TextMate, Xcode, Eclipse, and a host of other editors. Leveraging the editor that you already know and love is probably the single easiest way to get into revision control.
posted at 01:00 pm on July 27, 2006 by Mike West
25 I wonder what this button does
I did that once, on a UNIX server at work, with an unlabled blue button. I didn’t even press it, just touched it.
It was the reset button. Oops.
posted at 08:36 pm on July 27, 2006 by Marc Luzietti
26 Untitled
I did that once, on a UNIX server at work, with an unlabled blue button. I didn’t even press it, just touched it.
It was the reset button. Oops.
posted at 09:17 pm on July 27, 2006 by li hao
27 And other Content Management Systems?
I was dissapointed you didn’t mention any of the other version control options out there. Like CVS with it’s excellent TortoiseCVS windows explorer plugin, or Perforce which is the system we use at my office.
I’m sure it wasn’t intended, but you did make it sound like Subversion was the only options out there.
posted at 10:15 pm on July 27, 2006 by Kris Meister
28 i meant version control systems
wrong title in the above post.
posted at 10:16 pm on July 27, 2006 by Kris Meister
29 Wikis
Mike,
Thanks for the great article.
Any ideas on using subversion as the storage layer of a wiki like TWiki? For example, TWiki uses RCS. But RCS is the predecessor of CVS, and CVS the predecessor of subversion.
I’m thinking of using Kupu as a WYSIWYG html editor and PHP or (if I must learn it) Python to hook into Subversion. Hence, a modern wiki for our documentation.
posted at 02:09 am on July 28, 2006 by Andrew Banks
30 re: Other revision control systems, Wikis
Kris: I didn’t mean to make it sound like Subversion is the only option, but I do believe that Subversion is probably the best option for anyone who’s just starting out with revision control. It’s an open source program, meaning that no one needs management’s clearance to purchase it and start running, it’s ported to just about every operating system out there, and it’s drop dead easy to install and use. Perforce, Bitkeeper, and other commercial revision control systems are certainly powerful, but they’re nowhere near as obtainable as Subversion.
As far as CVS goes, I consider Subversion to be it’s complete replacement. Subversion fixes some of the annoying facets of CVS that I consider bugs (moving change logs along with files, storing directory revisions and properties, atomic commits, and more). For every project I’ve worked on in the last year or two, Subversion has simply been the better choice. The article, I think, reflects that. :)
Andrew: I don’t have any experience using Subversion directly as a store for a wiki. It sounds like an interesting idea. :) I currently run dokuwiki locally as a braindump, which stores all of it’s information in flat files which I rsync to a remote server nightly. The wiki takes care of diffs internally, so I haven’t worried too much about external revision control.
posted at 07:41 am on July 28, 2006 by Mike West
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21 Most stable GUI for the Mac?
I am as loyal a fan of subversion as you’ll find, but in my office, we frequently run into the same version-control wall.
Our graphic designers, who also need to do a bit of template editing, are not command-line saavy in the least, and they work exclusively on OS X. Our developers all use TortioseSVN on windows (or the command line on the Mac) to access our repository, but the designers – ha! fuggedaboudit.
So we’ve tried to find a GUI client they can use. I’ve checked out svnx, smartsvn, scplugin, and others, and all of them suffer from the same problem: when initially checking out a branch from the repository over the network, at some point during the checkout (not always in the same place) they will hang and we’ll be stuck with a spinning beach ball interminably.
Apart from apache integration, is there a working GUI for our Mac-only designers?
posted at 06:54 pm on July 26, 2006 by Danny Dawson