Subclipse

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Installing Subclipse Using Subclipse

Subclipse is an Eclipse plugin for interfacing Eclipse with the Subversion version control system. This is the Subclipse official web site.

Installing Subclipse

• Install Subversion.

  This is required since Subclipse is a GUI interface to Subversion. It is Subversion that provides all the version control functionality accessed via Subclipse.

• Install JavaHL:

  sudo apt-get install libsvn-java

  JavaHL is required for Subclipse to communicate with Subversion. If JavaHL is not installed (or not properly installed) then error messages will be displayed, referring to the unavailability of JavaHL, whenever you attempt to use Subclipse functionality from within Eclipse.

• Install Sublcipse. Follow the installation instructions at this Ubuntu Subclipse installation page. Ignore the part about launching Eclipse with "-vmargs -Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni".

Using Subclipse

The subclipse functions are available from the right click menu in the Eclipse Project Explorer window. These are the ones most commonly used. There is a separate Eclipse console window which will show the status of any svn operation performed with subclipse. Open a console window, Window | Show View | Console. Click the right most icon in the top right of the console window and select SVN Console from the drop down list.

• Import is equivalent to svn checkout.
• "Compare with" allows comparing a file or an entire project with the base revision, the latest revision in the archive or for a single file with a specific revision in the archive. However, it doesn't allow compare of an entire project to a different revision, only for a single file (it has a (Compare With | Revision..." menu item, but it is always disabled). Use Team | Show History to compare revisions for an entire project.
• The Team menu item has several sub-items. Here are the ones that are most useful. All but "Share Project" are not available until the Eclipse project has been placed in the svn archive (via Team | Share Project, for example).
  • "Commit" is equivalent to svn commit. It will bring up a dialog that has a text box on top for entering a commit log message and a tree view on the bottom showing what items will be committed to the archive. You can select or deselect items in the tree view. Be careful here, because unlike the subversion command line client, the subclipse default is to commit anything new or changed, which generally includes things we don't want to include. You can try using the subclipse ignore function to specify items or types of items to always be ignored when performing a commit. Use Team | Add to svn:ignore. However this menu item always seems to be disabled, even for files not in the archive.
  • "Update to Head" is equivalent to svn update.
  • "Show History" is like svn log. It shows one line per revision of the current project, with the revision number and the first part of the log message. It also shows the entire log message in a separate box in the lower right, which is much easier to read.

    To compare entire revisions, right click a revision in the history and from the pop up menu choose Compare to compare revisions. The compare dialog has text boxes that allow specifying the two revisions to compare.

  • "Share Project" is equivalent to svn import (and not to be confused with Subclipse Team | Import). This option is only available for Eclipse projects that have not yet been placed into the svn archive.