Subverted

A Subversion client that does not feel like a punishment.

SVN handles big binary-heavy repositories and file locking well. What's painful is that status on a large checkout is slow, every operation is a server round-trip, and the GUI clients mostly give the same model a nicer skin.

Subverted keeps a daemon resident next to your working copy so sv st answers from a warm index, and puts a CLI (sv) and a desktop app on top of it. The long-term plan (local history, file-level staging, locking workflows) is in docs/PLAN.md.

The working copy stays the truth. Subverted reads SVN's metadata and shells out to svn for everything that changes it. Plain svn keeps working in the same folder at all times. If Subverted dies, nothing is lost and nobody is blocked.

Status

Early, and honest about it.

• M0, reading working copies directly: done. Status matches svn status on the fixture working copies, with two known divergences documented in PLAN.md.
• M1, daemon and CLI: in progress, mostly working. Warm sv st on a 100k-file checkout is well under the 50 ms target on the daemon side.
• M2, the GUI: in progress. Live status and diff work, and the rest of the day-to-day flow is landing one slice at a time.

It has been built and used on Windows. The Linux and macOS bundles come out of the release workflow, but nobody has run them yet, and the test suite is advisory on those platforms in CI until it has been seen green there.

Install

Grab your platform's download from Releases. Every download has the desktop app and sv together.

• Windows: run subverted-<version>-win-x64-setup.exe. It installs for your user only (no admin prompt), into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Subverted, and adds that folder to your PATH, so sv works in any new terminal. The uninstaller takes it back off. There's also a plain .zip if you'd rather not install.
• Linux / macOS: unpack the .tar.gz and run ./install.sh. It copies everything to ~/.local/share/subverted, puts sv and subverted in ~/.local/bin, and adds that to PATH in your shell profile if it isn't there yet. On Linux it also adds a menu entry. ./install.sh --uninstall removes all of it. Set SUBVERTED_PREFIX to install somewhere other than ~/.local.

Whichever way you install, the three executables have to stay in the same folder:

File	What it is
sv / sv.exe	the command line
Subverted / Subverted.exe	the desktop app
subverted-daemon	the background process both of them talk to; starts itself on first use

The bundles are self-contained, so you don't need .NET installed. You do need the svn command line on PATH, since everything except sv st goes through it:

• Windows: SlikSVN, or TortoiseSVN with "command line client tools" ticked in the installer
• macOS: brew install subversion
• Linux: apt install subversion (or your distro's equivalent)

On macOS the bundle isn't signed and isn't a .app yet, so start the GUI with subverted from a terminal. Gatekeeper will complain until you clear the quarantine flag, once, after unpacking:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine subverted-*-osx-arm64

Builds of every push to master are attached to the CI runs as artifacts, if you want something newer than the last release.

Using it

sv st                       # what changed, from the daemon's warm index
sv d art/hero.png           # diff of local changes
sv log -l 5                 # last five revisions
sv up                       # pull in everyone else's work
sv lock art/hero.psd -m "repainting the sky"
sv commit -m "new sky" --mark   # also adds new (?) and deletes missing (!) files
sv pick -m "just the fix"   # walk the changes one at a time, commit what you pick
sv daemon status            # what the daemon holds, and whether it's watching

sv --help lists everything. Anything that throws work away (revert, rm, resolve --theirs) shows you what it's about to do and asks first.

For the GUI, run Subverted and open any folder inside a working copy.

Building from source

You need the .NET SDK pinned in global.json and svn on PATH.

dotnet tool restore
dotnet build Subverted.slnx
bash tools/run-tests.sh          # runs each test project's own executable
dotnet csharpier format .        # before every commit

Use tools/run-tests.sh rather than dotnet test. Under this SDK dotnet test sometimes discovers zero tests and reports that as success. CLAUDE.md has the details.

To produce the same layout a release ships:

dotnet publish src/Subverted.Daemon -c Release -o artifacts/bin
dotnet publish src/Subverted.Cli    -c Release -o artifacts/bin
dotnet publish src/Subverted.App    -c Release -o artifacts/bin

Releases are cut by pushing a v* tag. The workflow runs CI, bundles win-x64, linux-x64 and osx-arm64, builds the Windows installer from installer/, and attaches it all to a GitHub release. Tags with a - in them (v0.2.0-beta.1) are marked as prereleases.

Layout

src/Subverted.Core       status model, depends on nothing
src/Subverted.Svn        the only project that knows SVN exists (wc.db reads, the svn CLI)
src/Subverted.Protocol   messages between the daemon and the front-ends
src/Subverted.Daemon     holds the index, watches the disk, runs svn on the front-ends' behalf
src/Subverted.Frontend   finds or starts the daemon and talks to it
src/Subverted.Cli        sv
src/Subverted.App        the Avalonia desktop app
tools/                   probes, benchmarks and fixture builders

docs/ARCHITECTURE.md explains how the pieces fit and records every design decision, including the ones that were measured and turned out wrong. CLAUDE.md is the working agreement for contributors: it's strict, because this tool touches the place people's unpushed work lives.

License

WTFPL. Do what you want with it.