Version Control on OS X

October 19th, 2006

Version control is essential for application development when more than one person will be involved with the project if you want to avoid the nightmare of over writing each others files, and just plain useful even if you are developing on your own. Subversion is one of the best version control systems around right now. The great thing about it is that you can both work on the same file at the same time and integrate your changes when you commit them, unlike other version control systems that lock a file when someone is working on it which can be a total pain if someone forgets to check in a file and is not available.

I’ve been using subversion for some time now as coding takes up a large portion of my time, where as Chris, being primarily a designer, has had little experience with it. I wanted to find the best GUI for using subversion so that I could introduce Chris to the wonders of subversion. Both Chris and I run Apple computers so that narrows down the search some what. Here is a quick round up of subversion GUI’s I have tested (or tried to test):

• svnX - This is the software I have been using for the last few months. Its been relatively stable and provides a good feature set with a nice looking GUI. My only real complaints are that some of the more advanced functions are not that easy to work out how to do without reading the help files and there are too many windows.
• RapidSVN - Many people use this GUI, personally I find it a little slow on osx as its not a native application, I also find the interface a little clunky. In terms of how this works I have not come across any real issues.
• ZigVersion - The new kid on the block, its a little unstable at times and lacks support for some of the more advanced features but its early days yet. Looks very promising and could very well become the best GUI if all goes well for this app.
• SCPlugin - An OS X clone of TortoiseSVN, the website for this hasn’t been updated since 2004 so it looks like development of this has ceased. When I used it I found that it slowed down the finder to an annoying level so eventually had to remove it.
• Subcommander - This program might be good but I couldn’t test it as it crashed every time I issued a subversion command!
• eSVN - This program requires you to install additional software to enable it to run, once installed the window management on this application is so bad it makes it unusable. I gave up without even being able to add a repository!
• TextMate - Not a subversion GUI as such, but this has built in subversion support that works pretty well, it lacks support for some of the more advanced commands and I wish they had a menu for executing subversion commands. For quick commits while working on files this is great.

We are going to stick with svnX as its the easiest to use, fast, and there is a 1.0 update coming at some point which looks like it will be rather good. A word or warning though, if you upgrade to subversion 1.4 you will find that svnX is no longer able to work with your repositories. The 1.4 update has made quite a few changes to that way in which subversion stores it files, thes changes are not backwards compatible with 1.3 repositories. Subversion 1.3 and 1.4 server/clients will talk to each other just fine though.

Maybe Chris will post his thoughts subversion as a newcomer once he has had a chance to get to grips with it.

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