Xcode Subversion 1.5 Support

Apple added support for Subversion 1.5 into Xcode 3.1.1 back in September. This wasn't a big deal for us at the time (we were happy using Subversion 1.4 clients with our antiquated Subversion 1.2 server running on our old Xserve), but we knew we eventually wanted to get both client and server migrated up to a newer version. Well, rather than spend precious time upgrading our Subversion server (and later migrating it when the old Xserve is retired), we decided to move our version control to the "cloud" and pay someone else to worry about that. After looking around, we chose CVSDude. Dumping and uploading our repository to their system was pretty easy and the move leapfrogged us from Subversion 1.2 to 1.6.

Once the new Subversion repository was up and running, we used svn switch to point our existing working copies at the new repository:

svn switch --relocate \
    https://old.ablepear.repo/ \
    https://new.cvsdude.repo/

One potential gotcha is that Xcode sometimes seems to change the repository URL by inserting the username, so if you checked out https://old.ablepear.repo/, Xcode sometimes changes it to https://joeschmoe@old.ablepear.repo/. I'm not sure what the deal is with this, but a quick svn info will tell you what the current URL is for the working copy.

But the real fun began when I tried updating my Subversion client to 1.5. Subversion is actually fairly painless to build from source on a Mac, but I decided to go with precompiled binaries anyway. I don't have either MacPorts or Fink installed, so I downloaded the Subversion 1.5 installer from CollabNet. It's a standard Mac installer and it ran without a hitch, but it left me scratching my head -- after running, I opened a new terminal window and svn --version still showed me on 1.4.4. Poking around, I discovered that the CollabNet installer puts the Subversion binaries in /opt/subversion.

Well, no problem, I added /opt/subversion/bin to my development paths file in /etc/paths.d and voila! svn --version now shows 1.5.7.

After doing a svn up successfully on one of my Xcode project working copies from the terminal, I opened it in Xcode and tried to to SCM | Update Entire Project, which failed miserably -- Xcode complained that it's Subversion libraries were too old to work with the working copy. Subversion changed its working copy format between 1.4 and 1.5, and the new 1.5 svn command automatically upgrades any working copy it touches.

After some furious googling, I found out that Xcode's Subversion plug-in expects to find the Subversion libraries in /usr/lib, but CollabNet's installer puts them in /opt/subversion/lib. I still had my old 1.4 Subversion commands and libraries in /usr/bin and /usr/lib respectively. There's various schemes and scripts for copying or symlinking the Subversion 1.5 binaries into the correct places in /usr: Duane Fields' blog, the Lemon Team blog and Apple's Mailing Lists archive are representative.

Well, rather than patch something that was kinda broken, I decided to "use the Source, Luke!" and downloaded the Subversion 1.5.7 source tarballs from Tigris.org. (Be sure to get both the source tarball and the dependencies tarball.)

Once you have the tarballs, building and installing is fairly easy but will take fifteen minutes or so. Unpack both tarballs in the same directory. If you unpack them from the Finder, you should have two directories: "subversion-1.5.7" and "subversion-1.5.7 2". (If you do it from the terminal, they should both unpack into the same directory). One of the directories will contain the dependencies: apr and apr-util (Apache Portable Runtime), neon and serf (HTTP clients) and zlib (compression). Move these directories into the main Subversion source directory and delete the other one.

The INSTALL file in the Subversion directory doesn't make it clear that you need to run the included autogen.sh script to create your configure script. Once you've created configure, run configure --help to see all the build options. Now you can follow the standard Unix configure/make/make install build process.

A couple of gotchas: Subversion is configured to install into /usr/local by default, but to work with Xcode, we need to change that to /usr instead. Also, Neon, the default HTTP client, doesn't build SSL support by default. And since most Mac users don't have their EDITOR environment variable set, it's handy to set the default editor path.

Putting this all together, the Subversion build process looks like this:

cd subversion-1.5.7
./autogen.sh
./configure \
    --prefix=/usr \
    --with_editor=/usr/bin/nano \
    --with-ssl
make clean
make
sudo make install

Tip for TextMate users: create a symlink to the mate command

ln -s /usr/local/bin/mate /usr/local/bin/mate_wait

then change /usr/bin/nano to /usr/local/bin/mate_wait in the script above. (More about the mate command on the TextMate Blog.)

Tip for TextWrangler users: change /usr/bin/nano to /usr/bin/edit.)

Now Xcode is happy with my working copies. So when is Subversion 1.6 going to be supported?