The Rumors of Subversion's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Published 02 April 2014 by C. G. Brown

Git, as we all know, is increasingly popular due to its distributed nature and fast branching and merging. Runako covered in a previous post circumstances where you may want to use Subversion over Git for software development, or vice versa.

We know for many people, this is a bit of a "religious" debate. We hear more and more people talking about Subversion as if it were obsolete, or at least profoundly inferior to Git and Mercurial. We liked the opinion of a founder of Kiln and one of the contributors to Mercurual on this, seen on Hacker News here in response to an indictment of SVN by a poster. After explaining how Subversion is still better than Git and Mercurial in some key ways, he says the following:

"Just because Subversion doesn't use Git's branching system and isn't distributed doesn't mean it's totally without merit, and someone so wrapped up in Git's ecosystem that they can find no merit left in Subversion is a developer who likely has an irrational approach to evaluating systems."

Our opinion is simple: use the right tool for the job. Git is awesome for distributed teams in a flatter hierarchy, while Subversion works very well in a more traditional organization where access control is a central and essential feature. Both will keep your code safe with a low risk of corruption.

ProjectLocker is technology-agnostic. We view that as a core value, and it will always be as long as we are at the helm.

Topics: Software Development, Git, Subversion

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