Can I ask a potentially ignorant question? Why would someone who’s not already using Subversion choose to run it at this point? What are some of its advantages over Git or Fossil or Mercurial?
For software version control? Probably very little (especially as you included mercurial in the alternatives)
I think however, that SVN could be the basis of quite a good self-hostable blob/file storage system. WebDAV is a defined standard and accessible over HTTP and you get (auto-)versioning of assets for ‘free’.
Why would Mercurial in particular stand out on this list? Are you extrapolating from your own experience? I don’t think there are complete and reliable global usage statistic about any of these systems, are there?
On top of what stephenr says, Mercurial has an increasingly solid story for large assets from things like remotefilelog and other similar work from Facebook. That means I’d feel comfy using it for e.g. game asset tracking, at least to a point. Git is getting there too (specifically the work from Microsoft), but it’s a bit less mature at the moment.
Yeah, very much agreed that hg hits a rather nice middle ground. Their UI design is great.
Still, I don’t think we could infer anything from this about the actual number of users across the various vcs. Not sure though if I simply misunderstood what you meant.
Are you referring to mod_dav_svn? The last time I tried it it was pretty unreliable. It often truncated files silently. That’s probably not Subversion’s fault. Apache HTTPd’s WebDAV support doesn’t seem to be in a great state.
SVN is still heavily used by companies that are not pure software dev shops yet still produce their own software, e.g. in the financial sector and manufacturing industry.
I don’t think many people on lobsters still encounter SVN at their place of work, but that is due to lobster’s demographic rather than everyone on the planet migrating away from SVN. That is not the case. (Some people still use tools like ClearCase at work!)
Can I ask a potentially ignorant question? Why would someone who’s not already using Subversion choose to run it at this point? What are some of its advantages over Git or Fossil or Mercurial?
For software version control? Probably very little (especially as you included mercurial in the alternatives)
I think however, that SVN could be the basis of quite a good self-hostable blob/file storage system. WebDAV is a defined standard and accessible over HTTP and you get (auto-)versioning of assets for ‘free’.
Why would Mercurial in particular stand out on this list? Are you extrapolating from your own experience? I don’t think there are complete and reliable global usage statistic about any of these systems, are there?
On top of what stephenr says, Mercurial has an increasingly solid story for large assets from things like remotefilelog and other similar work from Facebook. That means I’d feel comfy using it for e.g. game asset tracking, at least to a point. Git is getting there too (specifically the work from Microsoft), but it’s a bit less mature at the moment.
Git is not the easiest thing in the world to learn/use.
If you just day “why use svn when git exists” it’s easy: because svn is easier to learn and understand.
Mercurial muddies that because you get the benefits of dvcs with usability that’s pretty close to svn.
I’ve worked in the last few years with entire teams that used no vcs.
Yeah, very much agreed that hg hits a rather nice middle ground. Their UI design is great.
Still, I don’t think we could infer anything from this about the actual number of users across the various vcs. Not sure though if I simply misunderstood what you meant.
Oh I’m not at all claiming to have stats on actual usage.
It was a hypothetical: if hg wasn’t an option, some developers will be more productive with svn than git.
I think this sums it up well: https://sqlite.org/whynotgit.html
Not about subversion in particular though, just a bash at git.
Are you referring to
mod_dav_svn? The last time I tried it it was pretty unreliable. It often truncated files silently. That’s probably not Subversion’s fault. Apache HTTPd’s WebDAV support doesn’t seem to be in a great state.That’s the only subversion http server that I’m aware of.
I suspect that post is about mod_dav - WebDAV into a regular file system directory.
Mod_dav_svn provides WebDAV + Svn into a repo backend.
I know some game studios still run subversion, because of large art assets along side code, and the ability to check out specific subdirectories.
SVN is still heavily used by companies that are not pure software dev shops yet still produce their own software, e.g. in the financial sector and manufacturing industry.
I don’t think many people on lobsters still encounter SVN at their place of work, but that is due to lobster’s demographic rather than everyone on the planet migrating away from SVN. That is not the case. (Some people still use tools like ClearCase at work!)
For something closer to my heart, LLVM’s official repository is still SVN.