I tried to use the VCSCommand-plugin for Vim the other day, but I ran into a strange issue: the plugin tried to use an older version of subversion with my working copy, resulting in “this client is too old” error messages.
The setup
I’ve got two copies of Subversion installed on my system: the default that comes with Mac OS X (1.2.4) and the one I manually installed (1.6.9). I have set my $PATH so that 1.6.9 (in /opt/subversion/bin) gets precedence over 1.4.4 (in /usr/bin). It all works fine from the command line.
The problem
I am using MacVim, which is very nice, but it apparently doesn’t know about my 1.6.9 installation and complains. It appears (from running :!which svn in MacVim) that MacVim (or so it seems any OS X app) ignores my $PATH adjustments in .bash_profile. Hence it is unaware of the /opt/subversion/bin/svn executable.
The fix
I tried adding a file with the extra location to the /etc/paths.d directory, as per this suggestion. That worked but did not help, as it appended rather prepended the new location to MacVim’s $PATH. It gave /usr/bin precedence over /opt/subversion/bin.
I then gave up trying to solve this neatly. Instead I configured the plugin around the issue, which still works rather nicely. I included this line in my .vimrc file:
let VCSCommandSVNExec="/opt/subversion/bin/svn"
This tells the plugin which executable to use. This solution is not very portable (the path to svn may very well be different on other machines), but I have not found another way to solve this. Of course I could mess with my Subversion installations, but down that path madness lies, or so I hear. For now, I’m glad I can get on with it.
