Migrate from Subclipse to Subversive on MacOS X
For many years I have been using Eclipse with the fine Subversion plug-in. Since I have updated my Eclipse to the Ganymede release (Version 3.4) I unfortunately run into one problem after another. Especially the SVN Repository browser failed to work most of the time.
So, after putting up with this situation for the last 2 months and applying all Subclipse updates in the meantime (and still no working 100%) I decided that I will give the Subversive plug-in a go. This is not a blog post favoring one or the other, but simply what is working for me and proves to work.
I have over 20 projects in different SVN repositories and thus I was eager to find out how to migrate my projects the best way. I looked all over the web, but only found some confusing information or nothing at all (excuse me if anything is available but honestly could not find it).
Thus I thought I publish my steps here:
- We assume you already have subclipse installed, thus go to “Help/Software Update”. In the following window click on “Installed Software” and scroll down until you see all installed “Subversion” plug-ins.
- Uninstall all “subclipse”, snv and JavaHL plug-ins, except “Subclipse” itself.
- Restart Eclipse.
- Go to each project that you have in subversion and do a right click, choose Team and then click on “Disconnect…”. Make sure that you keep your project settings.
- Restart Eclipse.
- Now uninstall Subclipse.
- Restart Eclipse.
- Now you are ready to install Subversive. Do do that you open up “Software Update” again. Navigate to the “Ganymede” tree and choose under “Collaboration Tools” the Subversive plug-in. These are called “SVN Team Provider” and is a bit confusing at first, but rest assured it is the Subversive plug-in.
- Once that is installed you will also need to add the SVN connectors. Due to some licensing issues you will need to grab them from a different site. Within the “Software Update” window add a new site and enter the following URL “http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/ganymede-site/”.
Once that site is loaded you will see three categories. Open the “Subversive SVN Connectors” and select the “Subversive SVN Connectors” and the “SVNKit 1.2.0 ……..” one. The later is quite important since I could not get Subversive to work with most repositories by selecting the “SVNKit 1.1.7 implementation” one. But the “SVNKit 1.2.0″ works just fine. - Restart Eclipse.
- Now with each disconnected subversion project do a right click, select “Team” and then “Share Projects…”. You should then get a dialog asking you some questions about the Subversion project, mostly you have to enter name and password again and you should be all set.
So far, all is well. SVN repository browsing is still not 100% working, but at least I can connect most of the time and browse it. If that happens a reboot of Eclipse will get me back in the game.
I am sure there are other ways to do it, but this has worked fine for me and worked with all projects.
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Just a very quick *thank you* for taking the time to write this and get me out of the crazy install situation I was in. Using the ‘ganymede-site’ Polarion update URL was the key in my case - using their published ‘http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/update-site/’ caused a number of unresolved dependancies.
Glad it helped. I was going crazy myself until one day I sat down and had enough nerve to try it all out
Thanks for this blog entry. I’ve been meaning to thank you the day you posted this. You finally helped me get out of a bad install/config.
I was still on Eclipse 3.3, but last fall I had installed subclipse for a few weeks, then decided to try subversive (to test both). Unfortunately you get mixed/bad results (that aren’t aparent right away). Since then every time I started a new project it would sometimes choose to use subclipse or subversive (whichever it felt like that day). I’ve had nothing but problems all these months and anytime I tried to uninstall subclipse or subversive, bad things would happen to my projects. I’ve wasted hours, days, and weeks trying to find any reasonable help on the interwebs. Then I read your post and the magic key was the “Team > Disconnect” (which I’d never heard of or tried before), then uninstall, etc. So I did that - I installed a new Eclipse 3.4 (why not), reinstalled all my plugins fresh (CFEclipse, subversive, etc) using your helpful hints here, and reconnected all 80+ projects. Sure it took me all night, but my development IDE is running great once more. Thanks!
Hi Jeff
Glad I could help. Just today I had some major problems again with Subversion. I wasn’t sure if it was our Subversion installation (on CentOS 5.2 with SVN 1.4.2) or Eclipse.
Anyway, what I have found is that the Subversive team recommends to use the latest 0.7.3 versions instead of the ones from the Ganymede download site. I then installed those (after fiddling around with the Connectors for an hour) and finally got it setup.
One really wonders, why they make it so hard to install something so important to developers.