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Asked: 2026-05-11T01:34:30+00:00

I am developing an application for the Mac as a small team (me +

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I am developing an application for the Mac as a small team (me + another person) effort. We are located in different cities, and have started to see the need for solid source control management.

None of us have any experience with this, and both of us are relatively new to Cocoa/Obj-C/Xcode (but do have C knowledge).

Does anyone have any recommendations as to which SCM system to choose? I understand that a lot of people are using Subversion, which is also supported in Xcode 3.1. Does anyone have experience with using Subversion through Xcode? Or is it a better option to chose a stand alone GUI alternative, such as Versions?

Grateful for any input on this.

Gregor Tomasevic, Sweden

Update/personal experiences: Since this post, we have tried Versions and Cornerstone (both of which are SVN GUI-clients), as well as Xcodes built-in support for SVN. We were not particularly pleased with Versions, which seemed to have some problems with committing unversioned files/build files. The built-in SVN support in Xcode works quite well, although it probably has limitations that we have still not run into. Cornerstone is both simple to use and powerful, and does not seem to suffer from the problems we encountered with Versions.

So far, we have just tried committing, updating repo, checking out latest/previous versions of our files and worked some with file comparison. It might be a whole different ball game once you start working extensively with branching, an area which we have been told both these GUI clients might have some weaknesses in.

For what it’s worth (and with only days of evaluation) Cornerstone seems to be a somewhat better alternative, although for simpler SCM, Xcode works well too.

Thanks for all the comments.

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  1. You can’t really go wrong with using Subversion.

    If, like me, you don’t like Xcode’s SVN integration too much you can always choose to use the command-line tools, or one of the several GUI apps like Versions, CornerStone or SvnX. Most of these tools work together pretty well, so you’re not necessarily tied in to the tool you start out with.

    I personally do most of my work with Versions, and use the command-line tools with the same working copies every once in a while.

    If you’re comfortable working with command-line tools exclusively until someone creates a good GUI app around it, git is a pretty viable option too.

    disclosure: I’m one of the people who work on Versions, so I might be slightly biased 😉

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