Much ado about scripting, Linux & Eclipse: card subject to change

2009-07-20

My love-hate with SVN, Part 6: Installation Ease Of Use

For months I've been annoyed by the fact that installation of Subversive (or Subclipse) requires fetching features and plugins from 3 or more update sites. No more!

Today, as an exercise to learn how to use the <p2.mirror/> task and provide a reproduceable, offline way to get Subversive into a virtual machine, I've created an update site zip, complete with site.xml and p2 metadata, which can be used to install Subversive from a single source. Here's the Ant script if you'd like to try this at home.

Because let's be real: you can only complain so long before it's time to roll up your sleeves and pitch in, right? That's how open source survives - thanks to people who care enough to complain AND care enough to help.

Here's the 13M update site zip, which includes the following:

Subversive 0.7.8
SVN Connector 2.2.1
SVNKit 1.2.3
JNA 3.0.9
ECF 3.0.0

Any problems, please report them in bug 284077.

2 comments:

Denis Roy said...

Thanks for rolling up your sleeves so often, Nick.

Mark Phippard said...

Subclipse has never required you to go to more than one site to install it. With Eclipse 3.5, you can even install it via the slick Mylyn installer:

http://blogs.open.collab.net/svn/2009/06/subversion-eclipse35-easy.html