SVN Clients

It has been a while since I looked at various clients for SVN. It looks like there are now quite a few more that work on that Mac. That’s fine, but not too exciting for me.

What is exciting for me is that the seemingly dead SCPlugin client has been brought back to life and is seeing active development. Information can be found at http://scplugin.tigris.org/. This client is a lot like TortoiseSVN from Windows and is integrated directly into the Finder.

In the past, SCPlugin was really buggy. So far (just one day) the newer version seems to be a lot better. It is however still far from perfect, and the command line is stil required for some things (like looking at a file’s history. Nevertheless, this will be a really nice thing to use.

SVK

What I was actually trying to research was the issue of including bundles (folders that appear as files on the Mac) in SVN. The problem is that many apps strip the invisible .svn folders out of the bundles and cause a lot of headaches. The issue is acknowledged on the SVN development site, and is listed as the lowest possible priority (and has been known for four years). So I suspect this issue is not going to go away by waiting for something to happen.

The one bright spot I found was a blog post here: http://weblogs.goshaky.com/weblogs/lars/entry/svk_the_svn_without_the.>

This introduced SVK. It took a bit of reading to figure out exactly what this is, but it is basically a layer on top of the SVN client that does some additional wrangling. So the repository is still an SVN repository, you just go through the SVK client to access it. This allows for the control files to be stored outside of the actual directory structure of the working sandbox — which means that the issue with the bundles will go away. This is good news. I haven’t tried it yet though. Here are a couple of links:

• http://svkbook.elixus.org/
• http://svk.elixus.org/view/HomePage

Google

In my various virtual wanderings, I also stumbled about Google Code. I hadn’t been aware of this…