Subversive project details
The Subversive project and its source code are released under the Eclipse Public License v 1.0. The external SVNKit library which is distributed with Subversive in form of binaries and source code has a TMate license.
The Polarion Software made a decision to start working on Subversive depending on four main reasons:
- Wide acceptance
In order to address a wide community, the Subversive project has as a high priority goal to become an eclipse.org project, and after gaining wide acceptance, to become part of standard Eclipse SDK distribution.
- Interoperable tools
As mentioned above, we need to develop a set of well integrated, mutually interoperable tools. This often requires reuse/refactoring/API and other modifications, which are understandable in the context of that goal, but probably not in the context of the isolated development of just a Subversion client for Eclipse.
- History
Subversive started as a component of the commercial rich client to the Polarion Server. As such, we have more demands to it than "just" an Eclipse based GUI to Subversion. We e.g. need a consistent GUI across the rich client and server, API access to Subversive functionality, access to internals of underlying SVNKit library, possibility to optimize for the specific Polarion purposes.
We've been contributing to the community since the very beginning of the Subversive project in a bit hidden way. We spent a lot of efforts on cooperation with SVNKit authors in order to reach stability as it currently has. Among others, this cooperation included testing and defect reporting.
- Dependencies
To achieve the needed functionality, Subversive relies on custom extensions of the SVNKit library. The standard JavaHL API doesn't come with sufficient support.