Now that the Mac community at openCollabNet is providing complete, up-to-date installers for command-line Subversion, what about GUI access?  This is the Macintosh, after all!  There are, of course, several stand-alone GUI clients, a standard integration into Apple’s Xcode, and plugins for Eclipse, JDeveloper, NetBeans, and other applications, but what about basic Finder access?  Windows users have had TortoiseSVN for years, and another Tigris project, naughtysvn, is working toward similar capabilities for the Nautilus desktop environment on Linux.  Why not the Mac?

“Why not,” indeed!  Introducing SCPlugin: Subversion for the rest of OS X!

Over at tigris.org, the SCPlugin project has been working away steadily to bring you full Subversion capabilities as a plug-in to the Finder itself — your entire desktop is Subversion-enabled.  We’ve just released version 0.7, a beta release we believe is full-featured enough to support your day-to-day work. 

So, what’s an SCPlugin?

We add “badges” to all the Finder icons for files and directories that are under Subversion’s control.  The badges tell you the status of the file: freshly checked out, modified, in conflict, and so on.

We also extend the Finder “Contextual Menu” (you know … control-click or click-and-hold-for-a-real-long-time, or right-click if you have a multi-button mouse) to have Subversion commands.  The available commands are applied to the files and directories you have selected when you pop up the menu.

With this plug-in, your OS X Finder joins the world of Subversion.

Some technical notes: Works in OS X 10.3.9 and 10.4.x.  Uses Subversion 1.4.x (don’t mix with other clients still using Subversion 1.3.x).  This is a beta version: some things probably don’t work.  Join the users@scplugin.tigris.org mail list for help with problems or use notes.

Jack Repenning, CollabNet CTO and SCPlugin community lead