User:Svnroar

Dan is currently seeking sponsorship to help continue the development. At this time it is the only SVN client that has shell integration for all major operating systems. It currently fills a small gap in the SVN client market and he is sure will be welcomed with open arms into the community.

SVNRoar is a subversion client that was started in mid 2009 by Dan Holliday. Unlike most projects this project was not started with the intention of being useful. It started as a training exercise. Dan had started using QT (from Nokia) and wanted to improve his skills within this development language. The only thing that was missing was a case study. So as he had used TortoiseSVN which is only available for windows he thought it would be a good idea to try and clone this application. At this point there was absolutely no intention of developing an application to share with other people. Also note that it was clone, not a port. The challenge was to replicate the functionality inside QT without looking at any source code from the TortoiseSVN. This way Dan could ensure that he was developing the QT way.

Dan had moved his business away from a windows environment and on to a Linux Ubuntu environment in late 2007. This was when he started to develop QT applications making them cross platform to reduce the cost of windows licenses, and enabling him to design and develop on a Linux platform. It soon became clear that there were limited SVN client tools for all three of the major OS (Windows, OSX, Linux). There are tools that were good in their own right and for their own OS’s but nothing that was suitable to run across all systems.

Before long it became a griping subject for Dan that he had to use several SVN clients to develop his apps cross platform. It was a shame that some good features of one client weren’t available in another, and time after time he had to resort to the command line.

It was at this point that Dan decided to invest some time in create an open source SVN client that could run on all major operating systems and give the same features everywhere. Dan brushed down his initial implementation from his QT training which he had lovingly called QSubversion, aptly named because of its use of the QT framework, and started to do some additional development.

Originally the QSubversion would call the SVN command line tool and interpreter the output, although miles away from a complete product development was looking good. At this point the idea was to offer an OSX and Linux version of QSubversion that would be an exact copy (clone not port). So at this point the project was re-named to cross-tortoise. The idea was that people who used TortoiseSVN for windows could use cross-tortoise and have the same functionality in OSX and Linux as they got from TortoiseSVN in windows.

This is where the challenges started to happen. Shell integration (i.e Icon overlays) are a vital part of TortoiseSVN. It’s probably the first thing that sets it apart from any other SVN client along with it’s simplicity. Creating the shell for windows proved to be easy, Nautilus plug in was also easy to achieve, but then it came to OSX’s finder.

With the release of snow leopard there has been a major uplift in security patches and updating, let alone a complete rewrite of the finder application. This now proved to be impossible to create icon overlays. The open source project scplugin has been trying for a couple of years to fix the issue without success. Dan was so close to completing shell integration and wham, a big road block. After about 6 months of giving up Dan decided to resurrect the project and see if, with his limited cocoa skills, he could get it to work.

After about 2 months of trying and a lot of help from good hearted people who have a passion for open source, a working example was finally created. This help to inspire Dan and start the project moving forward again.

With this renewed faith in the project Dan decided to re-think the product. After some short sessions of producing many spider charts trying to work out what would set cross-tortoise apart from it’s rivals Dan was finally happy. He didn’t want to just copy TortoiseSVN that didn’t seem fair, and although he wouldn’t have produced a windows version and tried to encourage people to use TortoiseSVN where ever possible as it is a fantastic product, something didn’t sit right. Dan wanted to make sure there was a definite distinction between his product and those that others had developed. The out put from the session was pleasing. It showed Dan that he could take the product in a different direction with new features, and improved old features. But still retain the familiarity that people are used to.

One of the first improvements was to stop cross-tortoise calling the SVN command line and interpreting the output. This was working OK but after some research he discovered that people seemed too frowned upon this method so porting over to the SVN API started.

It was at this time that he decided the tool should be renamed and professionally branded. After a short period of debating names the decision was taken to call it SVNRoar and a logo was drawn up.

SVNRoar is currently the development of a single developer. All development is done in what little spare time he has and all for free. There is no official release date for SVNRoar but please check the website regally for updates.

At this time it is the only SVN client that has shell integration for all major operating systems. It currently fills a small gap in the SVN client market and he is sure will be welcomed with open arms into the community.

Dan is also planning on changing SVNRoar so that it can talk to and interpret all major revision databases, such as SVN, GIT, GIT and maybe even VSS. It is planed that the extra support can be added from writing a plugin that can simply be installed. If you are a developer and interested in helping please contact Dan through his website.