I just read Eugene’s post about Subclipse withdrawing their project proposal from Eclipse. He points at a well written statement by Mark Phippard explaining why. I guess they have their reasons. But it would have been nice to see something posted on their project proposal newsgroup about this.

I got involved in this Subclipse versus Subversive debate when we were discussing moving to subversion on the cdt-dev mailing list. In the discussion of Eclipse clients, I mentioned that when I tried them I preferred Subversive. And actually, with some recent trials I did for work, I still prefer Subversive. Mark made a somewhat nasty reply to my comments. He made me feel bad for going against Subclipse. And in my searches for other peoples opinions, I more often than not saw him comment the same in support of Subclipse, and I’m sure he’ll comment here. I certainly commend him for standing up for his project and I sometimes do the same for the CDT, but I try to be more polite about it.

So, I guess that means Subversive wins at Eclipse. From my seat, and others have a right to disagree, but I am talking about my seat not theirs, having one project is a good thing. In reality, I don’t care who wins, but I do care that we produce a good subversion client for Eclipse and I don’t see how two competing projects helps anyone. They do, or are intended to do, the exact same thing. In fact, they almost look identical. I almost had to check the features list to make sure which one I had.

But I think we have a long way to go to get subversion client support up to the same capabilities as CVS. Having one project that we can all work on will help make that happen. My intention is recommend moving the CDT to subversion over the summer, but only if the client meets our needs. That means we on the CDT have a vested interest in making that happen. And I know how to make patches and attach them to bugzillas, so I can’t wait to get some time on it. And I will spend time on Subversive because it is an Eclipse project. So will others in the Eclipse community, because of that sense of community that is Eclipse. That’s something I think the Subclipse guys forgot to take into consideration.