Eclipse 3.4, OS X and Subversion - *rant* and success

IntelliJ has SVN support out of the box, Netbeans has SVN support out of the box (by calling the svn binary) - only Eclipse doesn't. For my Eclipse 3.3 install I have a working combination, which is old, but working (and dog slow).

When Ganymede (3.4) was out, I was trying to use it, but failed due to problems installing SVN support.

Yesterday, when looking at the x2svg sources again, I wanted to update the Findbugs plugin just to find out that Eclipse reports my configuration is borked and I can't upgrade findbugs.

I decided to give Ganymede another try and even found a 3.4.1 release. But still no SVN support in it :-( Googling around led me to this post
http://gigamaster.blogspot.com/2008/01/mac-eclipse-europa-svn.html, that gave some hope.
When I went to the upgrade pages in Eclipse, I saw another provider for SVN listed, so I tried it, installed the stuff, but at the end the situation was as before.
Ok, started to install the plugin from tigris (there is a newer version available than the one listed in the blog post).
Then I installed java hl support from mac ports

sh-2.05b# port install subversion-javahlbindings


which also first failed - mostly because some of my installed ports were not up to date.

After all this was done I was finally able to see the SVN section in preferences and the javaHL connector selected.

But wth does the Team context menu not show any option like commit or update? Do I need to add the SVN repository on the SVN repository explorer tab? I did so, but no immediate change.

Ah, there was this one last trick: Go to $workspace/.metadata/ and remove basically everything below it and then re-import all projects again. And all of a sudden I had SVN support in Ganymede. It would probably have been ok to remove just the entry for this one old svn plugin -- but which one is the right one?)

I mean, it is no rocket science, why can't Eclipse get this right out of the box?
I spent over 3 hours to get it to work.
The only good thing is that comparing the on-disk state with a remote version is much faster than what I previously had in 3.3.