In a previous post, I mentioned the competition between Subclipse and Subversive, two Eclipse plugins that provide integration with Subversion, a Source Code Management system, to become the official Subversion plugin under Eclipse.
I’m a bit late on this, but my understanding is that Subversive won. Their page on eclipse.org shows that they have been accepted as an Eclipse project, while the page for Subclipse says that it has been withdrawn (in April this year).
This comes as a surprise. Subclipse, long the de facto standard for Eclipse-Subversion integration, not retained as the default implementation?! Only a couple of months ago, Valtech Training France chose Subclipse without much hesitating for a training on Build Process (which I teach occasionally).
Apparently, the reason is that the Subclipse team withdrawn their proposal for their own reasons. They essentially argue that they can do a better job by staying outside the Eclipse project.
Maybe, but let’s be honest: if Eclipse comes with SVN support built-in, would you go look for another plugin? Well, me neither, just like I never looked for a replacement for the provided CVS plugin.
The official Subversive-Eclipse integration is still incubating so there is still much to do. I’m hoping it will be part of the next major release of Eclipse (next year?).
See another comment on the Subversive/Subclipse story
Subversive is one of the two Subversion plugins for Eclipse (the other is, of course, Subclipse). At each installation of Eclipse, I try to switch from one to the other.
Today, I’ve installed Eclipse 3.3RC1 along with Subversive 1.1.2. When trying to commit, there was an annoying behavior: Subversive would display an error (Malformed network data?!) and imply that the files were not committed (same display as before in the Synchronize view).
Lies! All lies! ;-)
An innocent Synchronize reveals spurious conflicts: the code was checked-in… it’s just that Subversive (or rather the SVN client) did not refresh properly. All you can do then is ask for Override and Update.
Fortunately, it’s not hard to fix. Go the SVN configuration in the Preferences window. In the SVN Client tab, you’ll find a drop-down box. The default selection is JavaSVN “Subversive Default”. Switch to SVN Kit: problem solved.
Did you know there were 2 Eclipse plugins for Subversion? Neither did I, until this morning.
The leader is still Subclipse. Runner-up is Subversive. Being a credible alternative when it was released, mildly insulting words were exchanged; the Subversive team even suggested that cooperation was in order (which was mostly rejected by the Subclipse team). This culminated with 2 competing proposals (one for Subclipse, one for Subversive) being made to the Eclipse foundation.
That was about 6 months ago. Today, I am not clear who the winner is. The proposal for Subversive states that it has been approved (though I thought that the Eclipse team usually did not give formal approbation). But development goes on furiously for both teams (both released Eclipse 3.2-compatible versions in early February 2007).
As for me, being behind a very annoying firewall, I cannot use the update feature from Eclipse to get Subclipse. So I am giving Subversive a shot.
Somehow, this all sounds like a storm in a tea cup, doesn’t it?
I’m writing this post as a future reminder for myself… This plugin is damn hard to find when you are looking for it.
All it does is automatically format and organize import statements in your Java classes each time you save (Ctrl-S). Basically, it replaces Ctrl-Shift-F (format), Ctrl-Shift-O (imports) and Ctrl-S (normal save).
I had used it for a month, and now that I have changed project, I find myself lost without it. I just found it again today.
Links: Eclipse Plugins website, SourceForge.
Together, let’s all thank Sebastien Vauclair for it.
Thanks to my colleague William Ferreira for the tip.
Update (18/04/07): this is now native in Eclipse 3.3. See Jean Laurent’s post for details.
