Carl the Zealot

Hey all… Been playing around with Eclipse a lot of late. Yes, yes, as a die-hard vim zealot, it is blasphemy. But let me tell ya, this Java stuff could really grow on me.

As part of my personal experimentation, I went ahead and installed Eclipse and the SVN plugin. I ran into a problem I feel I should blog about for posterity. When I tried to load a project from my subversion repository using Subclipse, I got this error:
Unable to load default SVN Client

Of course, the message was very confusing since the SVN CLI was in fact already installed on my system, and contrary to similar blog posts, not an old version, rather the correct one (1.5+). The problem was the SVN Java bindings were missing. For Debian, you apt-get install libsvn-java. On other platforms, search for “JavaHL” and it should pop right up in your package management (if not, get yourself a better distro! =)

I’m sure more blog entries on my efforts to “vim-itize” eclipse will be coming soon… ;D

Edit: I also had to add the following to my eclipse.ini:

-Djava.library.path=/usr/share/java/
-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni/

Edit 2: I also had to run update-alternatives --config java and choose a 1.5 JDK, as the svn client library didn’t yet support 1.6.

Edit 3:Also make sure that you are using Subclipse 1.4.X if you are using Subversion 1.5.X client/server, and Subclipse 1.6.X if you are using Subversion 1.6.X client/server. There are two different eclipse update server URLs for the two different minor versions of Subclipse. =)