Tags
review, SVN, svn client, tools
Preamble
(if you rate this I would like to read your comments about your rating)
So, this is such a massively reviewed area of software that I hesitate to repeat all the info out there already. What I have done is compile only what I consider to be the best SVN clients along with a few extras (see Bottom) and review them based on some general common factors such as ease of use, feature implementation of Subversion itself, Operating System(s), and which IDE’s, if any, the client integrates with.
No matter which SVN client you use (especially if you choose the command line) you would be much better off reading the O’Reilly SVN book (free online at: Red Bean Book). I can’t stress enough on how valuable the documentation is and most of it (even the book) seems well written – it’s just a lot!
In order to run through some basic features of the SVN clients I decided to hook up to a C# source forge project called Feedling (a desktop RSS reader with a plugin architecture). Since SF supports SVN I figured this was a good fit. I am NOT going to go through every feature but I am going to touch on the features I find important…at first. Comments or requests for more info in certain areas will drive further updates as one of my goals is to continue to update past posts with current information and/or commentary.
Finally, I am NOT an SVN expert (most of my work has been with the Microsoft stack in terms of SC) but I kind of think that is a bonus as I am familiar enough with SVN to know what works for me and hopefully should work for the average developer with a general understanding of SVN.
(FYI: I uninstalled each package after reviewing it even if it meant having to reinstall later as in the instance of VisualSVN needing TortoiseSVN).
Update – 11.11.2009: Added vendor supplied information about iVersion: a basic iPhone based SVN Utility. See the iVersion section for more information.
Update – 08.11.2009: Updates as follows for new version of Ankh-2.1.7141
Changes (from above link):
- Update Subversion Support to 1.6.4 level to resolve CVE-2009-2411 – More information.
- No other changes since previous release
Update – 07.29.2009: There have been some good updates to AnkhSVN 2.1
Update – 06.24.2009: It would appear (I said appear) that AnkhSVN is now upgraded to work with TortoiseSVN v1.6. I started up AnkhSVN today and it told me a major update was available which is located here: AnkhSVN 2.1 Download
Update – 04.28.2009: Recently the server for my repository was upgraded and required me to update TortoiseSVN to v1.6.x. That worked fine but AnkhSVN did not work so fine at all – I was getting some real quirky behavior such as files not getting checked in and when doing updates from the repository I was not getting the latest. I am not saying that AnkhSVN was the culprit but it has not been updated to work with TortoiseSVN 1.6.x – yet! So, you can help the AnkhSVN team by downloading the Daily Build here and testing it against TortoisSVN v1.6.x.