What are the pros and cons of the SVN plugins for

Question

SVN in Eclipse is spread into two camps. The SVN people have developed a plugin called Subclipse. The Eclipse people have a plugin called Subversive. Broadly speaking they both do the same things. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Answer 1

I actually think both of them kind of suck. Using TortoiseSVN is a far better solution in my opinion. It's far more robust and tends to just work better, and I've always had integration issues with Subclipse and Subversive.

Answer 2

I've used both, and while Subclipse has been flaky for me, Subversive (at least with a previous version) locked out an account of my coworker when he accidentally put in the wrong credentials (the network login is used to access the subversion repository).

Subclipse tends to get disorganized over time. If Eclipse is not refreshed regularly Subclipse seems to lose its file tracking information. Honestly, though, since I have the Easy Explorer Plugin, I use Subversive (occasionally) for history and change information, but I easy explore and use TortoiseSVN for commits and updates to the projects I know I've changed recently.

Answer 3

I've been using Subversive since I upgraded to Ganymede. I use it with Eclipse in Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora Core), Windows XP and Mac OS X.5. Aside from some issues getting Subversion 1.5.1 to use the right security libraries under Mac OS, I haven't had any problems. Given that it has been adopted as an Eclipse technology project, I am inclined to place my bets on it, in terms of long-term hopes.

Answer 4

I've also used both. I had the problem that I have around 150 projects on my workspace, and Subversive would take an awful long time when I selected all plugins and said "synchronize repository". The UI would freeze for an extremely long time. I find Subclipse to be more stable.

Anyway, I combine the tools a lot. For some tasks like checking out whole branches I prefer the command line. For others I use TortoiseSVN. I use Subclipse mostly to view history and run comparisons directly on the tool, and occasionally to compare (I prefer Beyond Compare for that, though).

Answer 5

I have not really used it, but it seems Subversive supports "Check Out As", just like the built-in CVS support does.

Like, to take a project from SVN and be able to run it as a web project, one might be able to do so in one go. But to get the same result in Subclipse, I just check out the sources and run:

mvn eclipse:eclipse -Dwtpversion=2.0

Answer 6

They both have pretty heinous warts, but I couldn't get Subversive to work with a project I had checked out from the command-line, and that was a show-stopper for me.