Now you can implement your major new features in your branch and commit them to subversion without affecting trunk. ThatвЂ™s it! YouвЂ™ve created your new branch in the repository and switched your working copy to it. This will create a branch named yourbranch.Д¬lick Next and leave HEAD revision selected.В Click Next again, enter a commit message like вЂњCreated the yourbranch branchвЂќ, check the вЂњSwitch working copy to new branch/tagвЂќ checkbox, and click Finish. Next select Team > Branch/TagвЂ¦ and specify in the Copy to URL field. And again, make sure you have no local changes. Create a new BranchД¬reating a new branch is almost trivial.В First, switch your local copy to trunk (if itвЂ™s not already trunk). Generally youвЂ™ll want to leave all of the other options in this dialog box as they are. If your working copy initially reflects, you could specify a branch as. In the To URL field, you specify the URL of the repository directory you want to switch your local working copy to. Next, right-click your project in EclipseвЂ™s Project Explorer, select the Team submenu, and click the Switch to another Branch/Tag/RevisionвЂ¦ item.В All of SubclipseвЂ™s actions are in this Team menu, so from now on IвЂ™ll refer to specific actions like Team > Switch to another Branch/Tag/Revision. Either commit your changes or revert them.

Switching may not sound that exciting but itвЂ™s key to branching and merging, as youвЂ™ll soon see.ДЇirst off, ensure that your working copy has no local changes. Using the svn switch command you can have Subversion modify your working copy to reflect another directory in the repository. If you initially checkout a branch, it reflects that branch. If you initially checkout trunk, then your working copy reflects trunk. Your local working copy reflects some directory in the remote Subversion repository. When your development is complete, merge changes from your branch back into trunk.Develop in your branch, periodically merging the latest changes from trunk into your branch.When you want to work on a new branch youвЂ™ll follow these general steps using Subclipse, which are described in more detail below: IвЂ™ll also assume that you have already checked out a local working copy of trunk, and that youвЂ™ve already created an Eclipse project using this working copy. In other words, a repository at with trunk, branches, and tags subdirectories. The discussion below assumes that you have a Subversion repository that uses the standard trunk/branches/tags structure. Instructions on this page were inspired by the Subversion Red Book. You should be using Eclipse 3.5, Subclipse 1.6.x and Subversion 1.6.x. In this post IвЂ™ll show just how easy it really is thanks to some newer features in Subversion and Subclipse (a Subversion plug-in for Eclipse). However, it has a reputation for being so difficult that many developers never take advantage of it. If you can't be bothered installing the extra stuff, you can simply set this dropdown to SVNkit (Pure Java).Branching and merging in Subversion is a great way to work on large new features without disrupting mainline development on trunk.

By default this is set to JavaHL but this option requires the JavaHL SVN libraries to be installed by following the steps below. Towards the bottom of the options on the right-hand side, you'll see a drop-down labelled SVN Interface.

In Eclipse, go to Window > Preferences, and expand Team in the left-hand pane and click on SVN.

You can use SVNkit, which is a pure Java Subversion library, but until you've sorted it out one way or the other, you're likely to see lots of error messages reading 'Failed to load JavaHL Library'. The JavaHL library is written by the Subversion team, and basically provides Java wrappers for Subversion's C API. For performance and platform independence, Subversion is written in C. With later versions of Eclipse and/or the SVN plugin, you have the option of using the Java native interface (JNI) library for Subversion support.

Subversion for eclipse