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Subversion is great. Once you have experienced the joys of version (a.k.a. revision) control, you will never look back, and by all accounts, the open-source Subversion is one of the best solutions around.

It has a Mac OS X client which works well, but it is a command line tool, and while it is not the hardest tool to master, it can be a little intimidating for non-technical users. This is where GUI clients come in very handy. There are a number of decent ones for the Mac, Svnx, Sven and RapidSVN amongst them, but the most elegant and convenient subversion client on any platform has to be the Windows plugin (shell extension) TortoiseSVN. This application adds a submenu to the Windows contextual menu that lets you perform subversion operations on a local working copy by simply right-clicking on any file or folder and selecting the desired operation from the menu. It is a very quick and intuitive way to perform most Subersion operations, which is why I was delighted to find out that some industrious souls had created SCPlugin–a Finder plugin for Mac OS X to provide the same functionality–and dismayed to find out that they had not released an update since December of ‘04.

SCPlugin is a wonderful little program which was never quite finished, and appears to have been gently abandoned. Lots of great work has been done on this project, but sadly it appears that, like so many labors-of-love, paying jobs and real-lives have forced the authors to leave it unfinished. All is not lost, however, as they have left us with two versions of the plugin, which, while not exactly 1.0 releases, can, with just a little finagling, become a useful part of a Mac-user’s workflow.

The older version, v269, is available as a binary download from the project’s site. It installs easily and I have used it successfully on OS 10.3 and 10.4. It requires the command line client to be correctly installed (see this MacDevCenter article for more on that). It does not implement every subversion client operation and has some minor interface issues, but I find it quite stable and extremely useful. The one gotcha I found was that the System Preference pane requires you to choose the location of your subversion command client, but it makes you do so with the standard Mac open dialog, which does not let you browse to the standard unix directories (the client will likely be in /usr/local/bin/ or similar). To get around this, you will need to use the “Go To Folder” command. Just press Cmd-Shift-G with the dialog open and type path to the directory with the client in it. Josh Buhler provides excellent step by step installation instructions on his blog.

The second version has no official binary release, so you will have to download the source code and compile it yourself. A pre-compiled version has been made available by this kind soul, which I have not tested, but I can only assume that this is indeed the latest codebase and will work the same as one you compile yourself. This version appears to be an almost ground-up rewrite of the plugin using the subversion API instead of relying on the pre-compiled command line version. This helps make the plugin faster, and the interface more Mac-like. Unfortunately, in my experience, while some things are better in this version (the little icon badges are more accurate) it is not as far along as the earlier one in terms of reliability, stability or usability. I would recommend sticking with the older version for day-to-day use, falling back on the CLI for advanced functionality.

It is a shame that this project fallen to the wayside, as it shows a lot of potential, and it is clear that a lot of hard work has been done. My thanks go out to the authors who got it this far, and I can only continue to hope that they can find some time in the future to bring this project back to life.