Challenges with Netbeans 6.0 Beta 2, Subversion, and Cygwin on Windows

by Jamie Raut

I came across a challenge today in using the new NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 release with Subversion and Cygwin. The solution wasn't very googleable (yes, that's a real adjective) so I'm jotting this down in the hope that someone else will find it useful.

The Problem

When trying to commit changes to a project in a Subversion repository, NetBeans kept complaining about a missing entries file:

svn: Can't open file '.svn/entries': No such file or directory

The Solution

The problem was that NetBeans was using the svn executable in the Cygwin distribution. This was solved when I installed a regular Subversion client for Windows (I used this one but any other should work) and fixed my PATH so that NetBeans would use the non-Cygwin Subversion. Quit NetBeans, restart. Q.E.D.