Dan’s Blog

Subversion, the almost-drop-in-replacement for CVS, has really taken off as of late, which is great. It’s got all sorts of nice features (atomic commits, file moves, etc.), integrates with apache, and is generally well loved by us developers. At least those developers who spend a significant amount of time on the command line. Because, unfortunately, the GUIs have been a little stinker-doodle.

If you just want to browse a source tree — which is pretty much what the GUIs are best for — the SVN kio slave added to KDE 3.4 wins hands down. You just type in svn+http://domainname.com/path and it handles the rest. The down side is that it doesn’t show the revision number or history of any the files you’re browsing, and doesn’t seem to include checkout / commit type functionality. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, though.

There’s also eSVN, which looks really very nice. It’s a little crippled when dealing with repositories that haven’t been checked out, though — it won’t do diffs between revisions, for instance. Also, logins are somewaht non-intuitive — both the user name and password need to be specified in the URL, rather than in a separate box.

The best that I’ve come across so far, though, is rapidSVN. Unfortunately, version 0.8 did nothing but segfault on my Gentoo box, and version 0.9 doesn’t compile unless you’ve got docbook installed, which I don’t. (I’ve submitted a patch to the Gentoo maintainer from upstream to remedy the problem, which will hopefully hit the mirrors soon.)

My favorite thing about rapidSVN is that you can point it at any source tree (local or remote) and get full version histories and diffs for all files without checking out a local copy.

The downside is that while it’s processing files, it tends to refuse to redraw, giving the impression of being frozen. So it’s still a little clunky, but all in all, I like enough to use it when I want to browse a source tree.