WARNING: Only follow these instructions if you actually want to hack on NautilusSvn, otherwise stick to installing the development snapshot. If you are an end-user please do not follow these instructions.

It's a good idea organize your code in the following way, this makes it easy to switch between branches and whatnot without fiddling too much.

Directory structure

mkdir -p ~/Development/nautilussvn/branches
ln -s ~/Development/nautilussvn/trunk ~/Development/nautilussvn/current

You'll notice later that this will make it easy to switch between branches, you simply have to change the directory current is pointing to (as long as the branch doesn't deviate too much).

Checking out NautilusSvn

Do want the SVN HEAD?

svn checkout http://nautilussvn.googlecode.com/svn/trunk ~/Development/nautilussvn/trunk

...or the development snapshot?

svn checkout http://nautilussvn.googlecode.com/svn/tags/latest-snapshot ~/Development/nautilussvn/trunk

Of course, you can replace ~/Development with wherever you want it to reside. Let's link everything to the current directory:

mkdir -p ~/.nautilus/python-extensions
ln -s ~/Development/nautilussvn/current/nautilussvn/lib/extensions/nautilus/NautilusSvn.py ~/.nautilus/python-extensions/NautilusSvn.py
mkdir -p ~/.icons
ln -s ~/Development/nautilussvn/current/nautilussvn/data/icons/hicolor ~/.icons/ 

Setting up a local PYTHONPATH

~/Development/python 
~/Development/python/nautilussvn symbolic link to ~/Development/nautilussvn/current/nautilussvn

Change ~/.profile to include the line:

export PYTHONPATH="/home/bruce/Development/python"

And parse this file in your ~/.bashrc so this environment variable is also available to Bash (note that ~/.profile needs to executable):

# Source .profile
if [ -f ~/.profile ]; then
  . ~/.profile
fi

Placing it in ~/.profile is needed because your GNOME session isn't started from a shell, so ~/.bashrc etc. is not parsed. You'll have to restart your session (logout/login) for the changes to take effect. Or you can load the extension immediately using (it won't be available to any programs not started from the shell though):

export PYTHONPATH="$PYTHONPATH:/home/$USER/Development/python/"
[run nautilus now]

Running for Debugging

Firstly, you need to terminate Nautilus itself and the status checker service...

nautilus -q ; pgrep -f service.py | xargs kill

...and then start it up:

nautilus --no-desktop . ; pgrep -f service.py | xargs kill

I recommend either logging to console (set in the settings menu for NautilusSVN), or my preference: running

tail -n 0 -f ~/.config/nautilussvn/NautilusSvn.log

...in a separate nice, wide console.

When you're done, just run

nohup nautilus > /dev/null &

...and you can close the terminal.