Gin

A Git inspired client for Subversion.

Why?

At work, we build new functionality in feature branches. With Subversion, this often means fiddling with repo URLs to create a branch or several commands in order to merge a branch back.

Outside of work many of us use git, so creating a similar command line DSL makes sense.

Install

Run the installer.

curl https://raw.github.com/richardhodgson/gin/master/install | bash

The gin executable should now be in your $PATH.

Usage

Change into the root of your check out and call gin as you would git.

gin <command>

For example, branch from the trunk of myproject and switch to the new branch:

svn checkout http://repo.com/path/to/myproject/trunk myproject
cd myproject
gin branch some-feature
gin checkout some-feature

Running svn info will now show the checkout has switched to http://repo.com/path/to/myproject/branches/some-feature.

See the manual for more commands.

Project structure

Projects follow a directory convention:

projectName/
    branches/
        some-feature/
        another-feature/
    trunk/

Projects are checked out at either trunk or a directory under branches.

Why don't you just use Git?

It's complicated.

Why don't you just use Gitsvn?

That's more complicated. Whilst that means we can use Git locally, we'd still have to push back to the Subversion repo eventually. I'd rather just use Subversion, however I do like the Git command line API.

Why is it named gin?

Its only one letter different than git and I like gin.