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About a month ago, I replaced my old SVN GUI client (svnX) with the excellent Versions SVN client from Pico. I won't rave about it now; check it out for yourself and bask in the goodness.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of using Versions, however, was that after the mandatory upgrade of SVN from 1.4 (OS X default) to 1.5, BBEdit's SVN support was broken. I kept getting the message "svn: This client is too old to work with working copy". Grr.

I looked around in BBEdit's preferences and even .plist files, to no avail. This morning I even filed a bug report with Bare Bones. Turns out that that was premature... BBEdit was doing the right thing all the time, using the system's SVN. The problem was that I had multiple versions of SVN installed.

From the command line:

Cerberus:bin bantik$ which svn
/usr/local/bin/svn
Cerberus:bin bantik$ svn --version
svn, version 1.5.1 (r32289)
   compiled Jul 25 2008, 12:47:20
...

As expected. However, this was less than expected:

Cerberus:bin bantik$ find / -name "svn" -print | grep svn
/opt/subversion/bin/svn
/usr/bin/svn
/usr/local/bin/svn

OK, but maybe some of those are links?

Cerberus:bin bantik$ ls -al /opt/subversion/bin/svn
-rwxrwxr-x  1 admin  admin  788520 Jul 25 14:05 /opt/subversion/bin/svn
Cerberus:bin bantik$ ls -al /usr/bin/svn
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  23 Jul 13 09:41 /usr/bin/svn
Cerberus:bin bantik$ ls -al /usr/local/bin/svn
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  23 Aug  3 19:39 /usr/local/bin/svn
       -> /opt/subversion/bin/svn

Aha! I've got an old version of SVN at /usr/bin. So let's replace that with a symbolic link to the new version:

Cerberus:bin bantik$ sudo rm /usr/bin/svn
Cerberus:bin bantik$ sudo ln -s /opt/subversion/bin/svn /usr/bin/svn

That should do it. I restarted BBEdit just to make sure, and now, like magic, Subversion integration works again.

Comments

John Lascurettes
September 3, 2008 at 9:59 AM

Thank you for that. Very helpful. It was driving me bonkers too and I didn't see any documentation on Bare Bone's site about it.

brad
September 10, 2008 at 10:46 AM

thanks for posting this. I had the same problem and this fixed it. It also taught me a little more about the BASH shell.

Fitzgerald Steele
December 9, 2008 at 4:52 AM

I also found this helpful...Thanks!

Kevin Kohrt
February 27, 2009 at 2:22 AM

There are a number of svn tools in the bin directory. A quick way to fix them all is: sudo rm /usr/bin/svn* sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/svn* /usr/bin (or whatever your preferred current location happens to be, e.g. /opt/subversion/bin/svn*)

Quevin
February 27, 2009 at 2:04 PM

Thanks! This was very useful. I have the same setup with Versions, Beanstalk, and BBEdit.