Subversion Just Works in NetBeans

It was exciting to read that the JDK sources are now available as a java.net project (admittedly, my life is pretty low-key). Igor Kushnirskiy's blog on accessing the sources using Subversion was very useful, so this looked like a decent trial of the new Subversion support recently added to the NetBeans 6.0 daily builds. I was a little scared between trying pre-alpha software and reading all the comments to Igor's blog about repository access problems. Of course, those worries didn't stop me from running new software without reading any sort of documentation or doing a backup! I am a developer, after all.

I pulled up the Subversion menu for the first time, found "Checkout..." which displayed a non-threatening dialog, which I filled in using the information from Igor's blog:

The first surprise was clicking the Proxy button and finding it already had my proxy server address from CVS (yes, tools should share user data, but they usually don't). Hitting the Next button, I found the tool was smart enough to see that my repository path included the folder I wanted, and initialized the Repository Folder(s) field with that path. How refreshing to have a tool just do the right thing instead of throwing up an "invalid repository URL" error dialog. I then entered my java.net user name and password:

I clicked the Finish button with my eyes squinted in case my laptop's drive exploded, but ... it ... just ... worked: an output window opened, my drive started churning (switching to a shell window showed that directories and files were being created as they were supposed to), and in a few minutes the whole JDK source was checked out.

Kudos to the NetBeans Subversion team for such a great first impression! I'm sold -- when can we move the NetBeans source from CVS to Subversion?