Karl Katzke

The version of the command-line svn client for OSX is badly out of date — I think it’s 1.1 or something stupid like that. (Apple has done a poor job of keeping command line utils up to date!)

The SCPlugin available via the Tigris.org website is -OK-, but not great. There’s some things that it does that just don’t feel right… I’ve just never gotten used to using a GUI (even TortoiseSVN) to manage repositories. Plus, my Vim plugins don’t work with SCPlugin and I’d rather be able to control things without switching from terminal windows into gui windows.

Yes, I -am- old school …. but I know there’s others of me!

To install up-to-date versions of the svn command-line client, just follow these easy steps.

1. Install X11 from your OSX DVD. It’s necessary to have X11 installed before you install xCode so that it pulls in the X11 sdk.
2. Download and install XCode 3.0 if you haven’t already.
3. Download and install MacPorts and follow their directions until you can run #4…
4. … sudo port -d selfupdate. The -d flag tells it to output debug information, which gives you a better idea of what went wrong if it errored out.

   Now, I ran into a small problem with the next step. You SHOULD just be able to sudo port -d install subversion… but it errored out because I didn’t have awk installed, or some other dependency was missing. At this point, I ran sudo port install gawk and then sudo port deps subversion … I installed the first few dependencies by hand, and after that it let me run sudo port install subversion and it safely installed the subversion client.

And voila! You should be able to do things like you normally would with subversion from the command line in linux. Maybe it’s just how *I* learned, but I really do prefer working with subversion repositories via the command line.