SVN

The SVN preferences panel is opened from menu Options > Preferences > SVN and it is the place where the user preferences for the embedded SVN client tool are configured. Some other preferences for the embedded SVN client tool can be set in the global files called config and servers, that is the files with parameters that act as defaults applied to all the SVN client tools that are used by the same user on his login account on the computer. These files can be opened for editing with the two edit actions available in the SVN client tool on the Global Runtime Configuration submenu of the Options menu.

The SVN Preferences Panel

The SVN preferences are the following:

• Enable symbolic link support (available only on Mac OS X and Linux) - Apache Subversion^TM has the ability to put a symbolic link under version control, via the usual SVN add command. The Subversion repository has no internal concept of a symbolic link, it stores a versioned symbolic link as an ordinary file with a svn:special property attached. The SVN client (on Unix) sees the property and translates the file into a symbolic link in the working copy.
  Note: Windows file systems have no symbolic links, so a Windows client won't do any such translation: the object appears as a normal file.

  If the symbolic link support is disabled then the versioned symbolic links, on Linux and OS X, are supported in the same way as on Windows, that is a text file instead of symbolic link is created.

  Important: It is recommended to disable symbolic links support if you do not have versioned symbolic links in your repository, because the SVN operations will work faster. However, you should not disable this option when you do have versioned symbolic links in repository. In that case a workaround would be to refer to working copy by its real path, not a path that includes a symbolic link.
• Allow unversioned obstructions - This option controls how should be handled working copy resources being ignored / unversioned when performing an update operation and from the repository are incoming files with the same name, in the same location, that intersect with those being ignored / unversioned. If the option is enabled, then the incoming items will become BASE revisions of the ones already present in the working copy, and those present will be made versioned resources and will be marked as modified. Exactly as if the user first made the update operation and after that he / she modified the files. If the option is disabled, the update operation will fail when encountering files in this situation, possibly leaving other files not updated. By default, this option is enabled.
• Use unsafe copy operations - Sometimes when the working copy is accessed through Samba and SVN client cannot make a safe copy of the committed file due to a delay in getting write permission the result is that the committed file will be saved with zero length (the content is removed) and an error will be reported. In this case this option should be selected so that SVN client does not try to make the safe copy.
• HTTPS encryption protocols - Option available only if you run the application with Java 1.6 or older. Sets a specific encryption protocol to be used when the application accesses a repository through HTTPS protocol. You can choose one of the following values:
  • SSLv3, TLSv1 (default value)
  • SSLv3 only
  • TLSv1 only
• SSH - Here you can specify the command line for an external SSH client which will be used when connecting to a SVN+SSH repository. Absolute paths are recommended for the SSH client executable and the file paths given as arguments (if any). Depending on the SSH client used and your SSH server configuration you may need to specify in the command line the user name and / or private key / passphrase. Here you can also choose if the default user name (the same user name as the SSH client user) will be used for SVN repository operations or you should be prompted for a SVN user name whenever SVN authentication is required. For example on Windows the following command line uses the plink.exe tool as external SSH client for connecting to the SVN repository with SVN+SSH:

  C:\plink-install-folder\plink.exe -l username -pw password -ssh -batch host_name_or_IP_address_of_SVN_server

• Results Console - Here you can specify the maximum number of lines displayed in the Console view. The default value is 1,000.
• Annotations View - Here you can set the color used for highlighting in the editor panel all the changes contributed to a resource by the revision selected in the Annotations view.
• Revision Graph - Here you can enable caching for the action of computing a revision graph. When a new revision graph is requested one of the caches from the previous actions may be used which will avoid running the whole query again on the SVN server. If a cache is used it will finish the action much faster.