The mac is a pretty complete system for developing applications. Once I was surprised that tools like subversion and maven come pre-installed. There is a big advantage for the non-technical users that these tools are pre installed. Although I doubt that these people will use it a lot. Would you teach a person to use command line subversion? I guess not. You would teach them to use a tool like Versions. As a developer you can run into problems when you want to upgrade one of these libraries. Some time a go I have already written a post about upgrading maven on the mac. This is a short post about upgrading subversion.
Like I said, mac osx comes with a subversion client out of the box. At least Leopard does. If you do not believe me, try the following command and watch the output:
svn –version
svn, version 1.4.4 (r25188) compiled May 31 2008, 03:45:57 Copyright (C) 2000-2006 CollabNet. Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/ This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/). The following repository access (RA) modules are available: * ra_dav : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV (DeltaV) protocol. - handles 'http' scheme - handles 'https' scheme * ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol. - handles 'svn' scheme * ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk. - handles 'file' scheme
This is not the most recent version of subversion. That comes with performance as well as use ability problems. I am not going into details here. The biggest problem to me is that I use Versions and IntelliJ with subversion 1.5. Now my command line client does not work anymore. This is a problem for some of the maven projects. Therefore I want to upgrade the commandline subversion client. I was surprised that there are almost no resources on the web to do this without installing other libraries. But I found a pretty easy way. Execute the following steps:
- Download the binaries from the website : http://subversion.tigris.org/getting.html#osx. I used the openCollabnet version. You do have to provided your details to download, just leave everything empty.
- Use the downloaded installer to install all the subversion binaries.
- Make sure that the new binaries are on the path before the original subversion libraries. Issue the following command in a terminal.
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
Those are the most important steps. If you do this in a terminal and execute the svn –version again you get the following output
svn, version 1.5.4 (r33841) compiled Oct 27 2008, 11:19:10 Copyright (C) 2000-2008 CollabNet. Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/ This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/). The following repository access (RA) modules are available: * ra_neon : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV protocol using Neon. - handles 'http' scheme - handles 'https' scheme * ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol. - with Cyrus SASL authentication - handles 'svn' scheme * ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk. - handles 'file' scheme * ra_serf : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV protocol using serf. - handles 'http' scheme - handles 'https' scheme
That worked, the version is now 1.5.4. If you do not want to execute this command every time you need it, you can add it to you .profile. If you need more info on how to do just that, you can find a good explenation here.
Hope this post helps you use the new and improved subversion.