So this week, I tried out theNetbeans module for Subversion repositories. I’ve used the CVS module before with a great deal of success before, so I was somewhat shocked to have so much trouble using Subversion.

Mainly, the problem I had was with user account authentication. To commit about 10 files and a few directories, I had to authenticate around 15 times, occasionally several times per file. It took me about an hour to import a basic project. The repository location is not the base path, similar to the Create New Project path, but rather the actual directory name the files are committed directly into. That is, if you select http://repo/folder and try to commit the files alpha and omega from source directory orig, you will get http://repo/folder/alpha and http://repo/folder/omega. That doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, but at least it will build correctly as a fresh checkout.

I was also somewhat upset to discover the Java herd for Gentoo has apparently decided not to provide any mechanism for downloading the Netbeans modules similar to all sorts of other applications and their plugins (gstreamer anyone?). I installed the module from the official Sun repository, so I hope they’re placed in the .netbeans folders.