How to use subversion and eclipse in combination

The original ECLIPSE installation has integrated support for CVS, a popular open source change management system. The functionality and limitations of CVS are well known, but many teams have been studying other version-controlled systems to provide better scalability, better support for merge changes and branching versions, and better support for binary file formats.

Subversion (SVN) is the most popular CVS alternative, providing better performance (allowing smart local caching and database backend), easy and fast branching (branching), and answering all problems common to using CVS.

Continue reading this article to learn how to add Subversion support to Eclipse and how to perform basic versioning activities through the IDE.

Before you start

To successfully learn the content of this article, you need to download and install Eclipse. Downloading the Eclipse SDK package for your platform will provide you with the basic Eclipse IDE (also known as Eclipse Platform) and java™development kit. If you are planning to use C + + (which I am planning to do), visit the C Development Tooling (CDT) Web site and install the CDT using Update Manager (the next section describes how to use Update Manager).

You also need to access the Subversion repository. If you need to build a subversion repository, you can find some excellent references in the Subversion Web site. For demonstration purposes, I'll show you how to check out the Subclipse project and use the items in the repository on the local area network.

Add Subclipse to Eclipse

Subclipse is a project that adds Subversion support for the Eclipse IDE. We will add Subclipse to the Eclipse IDE using Eclipse's update manager. From the Help menu in Eclipse, choose Software Updates > Find and Install to open the update manager.

Figure 1. Eclipse Update Manager