Working With Eclipse, Subclipse, and Subversion

Introduction

This page of the wiki explains how to get Eclipse, Subversion, and Subclipse all working together. You need to have Eclipse, Subversion and Subclipse installed on your Debian box in order to follow the steps outlined below. (We used the "unstable" Debian Etch versioned packages for of all 3 programs.) You can learn more about each of these tools at their respective web sites.

Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/

Subversion: http://subversion.tigris.org/

Subclipse: http://subclipse.tigris.org/

Andrew Vaughan was kind enough to offer some comments on this portion of the wiki. You can find them here.

Selecting Your JDK

I used the "non-free" pacakges for Sun's JVM/JDK to get Subclipse working on my Debian box. I have sometimes had problems working with other JVM implementations on Debian. I believe Subclipse will work with the other JVM implementations on Debian, but you may run into obstacles not mentioned here. If this is the case, please let me know what problems and resolutions you find, so other Debian Java users can benefit. You can e-mail the information to sunburned.surveyor@gmail.com.

A Word About Connection Protocols

Clients can connect to Subversion using different protocols. Sublcipse must connect to Subversion in this way to function properly. Subclipse currently uses 2 different programming libraries to connect to Subversion, and some of these libraries do not implement all of the possible protocols. (You might especially have trouble connecting to a repository on you local machine, or one that you do not acces across a network.) You can select which library Subclipse will use to connect to Subversion by viewing the preference page for the plug-in. (I believe the recommended library is JavaSVN.)

You should read the information at the following link and understand which protocol you are going to use and why.

http://svn.collab.net/subclipse/help/index.jsp?topic=/org.tigris.subversion.subclipse.doc/html/reference/protocol.html

Mark Phippard shared some information about the connection protocols with me, and I wanted to post it here for others. He let me know that there really is no "recommended" adapter for use with Subclipse. (The adapter is the program library that allows you to connect to Subversion via the different protocols.) JavaHL is the default adapter used, if the proper version is found by Subclipse. If the proper version of JavaHL is not found, then JavaSVN is used.

Mark also mentioned that the JavaHL library is installed in /usr/lib/jni by default. However, most JVM implementations on Debian, including Sun's, do not look for libraries in this folder. (This means Java programs installed on Debain won't have access to the functionality in these libraries.) This is not something you need to worry about if you are using the standard Eclipse packages for Debian. The package maintainers have created a shell script that launches Eclipse. This shell script tells Eclipse where to find the JavaHL library. (Note: This will not fix the problem for your other Java programs.) Hopefully this is an issue that we can get fixed in the other Debian Java implementations.

Getting the right cryptography files...

In order to connect to a remote Subversion repository with Sublclipse using the JavaSVN adapter and the https:// protocol you will need to install the "unlimited strength" version of jurisdiction policy files in your JDK. You can learn more about the reason why and download the files you need at this link:

http://java.sun.com/products/jce/javase.html

On my system I needed to replace the US_export_policy.jar and local_policy.jar files in the /usr/lib/j2se/1.4/jre/lib/security directory.

Obtain and install the most recent version of the Debian JavaHL package.

If you want to use the JavaHL library to connect to Subversion from Subclipse you might run into problems with the older Debian package. If I remember correctly, I had problems with the 1.2.3 version of the "libsvn-javahl" package. I recommend that you use a newer version of this package. I was originally using version 1.3.2-4 of the package, which seemed to work just fine. I think you'll be safe with any package of libsvn-javahl that is version 1.3.2-4 or later. As of this date you must look in the Debian Unstable section to find those packages. The Debian Testing section has the older package version that won't work.

You can find the unstable version of the libsvn-javahl Debian package here:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/libsvn-javahl

Summary

1 Install Eclipse, Subclipse, and Subversion

2 Install your desired Java SDK. (I recommend Blackdown's.)

3 Select your connection protocol and the correct library that supports that protocol. (Use JavaSVN unless you have a reason to use JavaHL.)

4 Install the correct JCE/Cryptography files for your Java installation.

You should now be able to work with a Subversion repository in Eclipse, usiong Subclipse on your Debian system!

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