Installing subversion support for Eclipse on Linux

You have two choice: subversive (Belongs to the Eclipse project) or subclipse (hosted on tigris.org).

Even though Subversive is the more ‘official’ option, I find it prohibitively confusing to install. You have to go to an external site (polarion) and download a bunch of stuff nobody told you what. It took me 2 hours fiddling back and forth between Eclipse site and Polarion site only to install the wrong stuff. Highly not recommended! Agrh!

I have a better start with subclipse. The only URL from their site worked perfectly with eclipse’s ‘install new software’ dialog. Better still, you don’t really need to install JavaHL (which is also ridiculously hard to install), you can use the SVNKit package in the same repository and everything will work.

To install subclipse, go here

For those of you who prefer JavaHL, here is how to install JavaHL on Fedora 16. JavaHL is another middle layer required between any Eclipse plugin and SVN (I don’t know why things are so complicated when it come to designing on Linux). Most of the sites on the internet recommends you to install that by

sudo apt-get install libsvn-java

But there is no such package on Fedora, so I tried to use add/remove software and searched for various part of the name. I finally found it when searching for ‘JavaHL’, the correct package name is

subversion-javahl

Documentation and tutorial and another thing the Linux community didn’t do well!