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 would say Subclipse, as I couldn't even get Subversive working ;)

Answer 2

If you are using one of them in your company and maybe even want to bundle them in own Eclipse-based products, your life is much easier with Subclipse, because it is available under the business-friendly Eclipse Public License.

Subversive on the other hand needs so-called connectors to fully work. And those have separate and different licenses. So you may end up with two or three different licenses just for the Subversive functionality, while all other Eclipse plugins are just under that one EPL. That's also the reason why those connectors are not hosted at eclipse.org.

And that's why they are downloaded dynamically after the Subversive installation (which also means that simply mirroring the eclipse.org update site does not give you a usable Subversive offline installation in your company network).

Answer 3

As an addition to Brendons answer:

We use Subversion since version 1.5.1 and used Subclipse first. But because we greatly depend on the merging feature, we switched to Subversive which is more convenient and has a seperate Reintegrate option in the merging dialog.

One bug that might hinder at merging is that if you select revisions explicitly, it doesn't take the last revision listed. E.g. "101-100" doesn't merge r100 and "100" thus doesn't merge anything at all. (version 0.7.5)

And it has uses the same indicators as the CVS plugin.

Answer 4

I have just discovered that I cannot figure out how to view a properties diff with Subclipse. In Subversive you select two revisions in the history view, right-click and select compare properties from the popup. This is enough for me to stick with Subversive.

The reason for trying to switch was Subversive's strange behavior on OS X: Some automatic operation called 'svn cache update' hogged the CPU at abnormal levels after every 'svn update' run, always taking an annoyingly long time to complete.

Answer 5

After reading this post, I changed to Subclipse hands down.
http://eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t77149.rhtml#92035407

Answer 6

Subclipse, because at least it works.

Subversive has been a bucket of fail for me so far. It wouldn't play nice with all of my old projects I had checked out with Subclipse.