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

While I got both working with Helios, I have a slight preference for Subclipse because of its excellent support for bugtraq properties (details here).

The History view shows a separate column (titled bugtraq:label, displaying BUGIDs), and the context menu has a dedicated action to "Open Bug URL" (linking to bugtraq:url) -- I couldn't figure out how to access any of this info with Subversive.

Answer 2

FWIW, we are using an ancient version of SVN server (1.4 something), and I seem to remember that at one point there was an update to Subclipse that broke backward compatibility, and the gist was "nobody should be on such an old version of SVN anyway".

Subversive was the only one that seemed to be able to handle the older version. I can't remember the details, though, sorry.

Answer 3

Both are very similar but Subversive is the "eclipse svn provider". I primarily use Subversive because of a few convenient features:

Grouping of history

When I'm browsing the history of a branch instead of just seeing a bunch of rows for every commit it can group commits by today, week, etc.

Mapping of trunk, branches, and tags

Subversive assumes the default svn layout: trunk, branches, tags (which you can change), so whenever you want to tag or branch it is one click and you provide the name of the tag or branch.

Like I said these are minor differences that I just find convenient. Both work great with mylyn, but overall there really isn't a whole lot of differences with these two extensions.

Merging with Subversive is a pain though (haven't tried Subclipse), I've never been able to successfully merge. The preview of the merge is great but it would never complete the merge or it will take way to long. Most of the time I complete merging through the command line without any issues.

Answer 4

Just an update. I recently was reinstalling Eclipse and was faced with choice of Subclipse vs Subversive. I, also, had my share of troubles trying to get Subversive to work so I went for Subclipse.

It installed perfectly on my Linux 64 bit machine and is running just fine. I mapped most common functions like Update, Commit, .. to shortcuts and it's a blast. The merging is good too, although for bigger merges I still turn to TortoiseSVN. I tried it with both 3.5 and 3.6, and they both work fine. I ended up using 3.5 because for some reason key binding were not working with 3.6.

Answer 5

Certainly both IDE plugins have their issues. But neither precludes the parallel use of other solutions like TortoiseSVN or command-line. I use all three for my projects at work.

The important thing to remember is that all your client SVN software should use the same SVN file format--which differs between versions of SVN--or you are asking for trouble.

Another issue we found is when your client software uses a different SVN file format than the server. (By file format, I mean the way all the information is represented in all those seemingly invisible .svn files that effectively record what SVN needs to know about your project files.) That can wreak havoc. There's a documented bug between 1.5 server and 1.6 clients, but I can't find the link right now.

We had issues running the superior (IMO) Subclipse 1.6 plugin because of incompatibilities with our SVN 1.5.5 server. So we reverted to Subversive. It works fine, albeit slow and somewhat buggy (but improving). We will switch to Subclipse when our server is updated, though. And yes, we check out our projects with TortoiseSVN and import them into Eclipse (it's faster).

We found that, as other posters said here, it would NOT work if we ran newer versions of TortoiseSVN that wrote files in 1.6.x format, but when we reverted to TortoiseSVN 1.5.x, it worked just fine. The same was true of the command-line client (which we leverage with our Ant tasks).

Answer 6

+1 Subclipse
-1 Subversive

Subversive gets confused after even minor refactoring and has validation issues as above.

Environment: STS 2.7.2 (based on Galileo)