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0 pointsjogjayr7y ago0 comments

Having worked in both git and SVN shops, SVN is adequate as a server-side VCS. Most of the time you don't need branches on the server side. However, using only SVN client-side is absolute misery - no interactive rebasing, local commits, local branches, stashing, or committing specific lines from a file. You absolutely have to use something like git-svn or hg-svn to be productive.

The other (and this is a major one) downside of adopting SVN for your org is the dearth of decent tools for code review and collaboration. At a previous company we used Fisheye/Crucible which is seriously not fit for purpose. At another SVN shop I worked at, we emailed patches to each other (seriously). And the lack of quality tooling is down to SVN's declining popularity - there's no market.

0 pointsjogjayr7y ago0 comments

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5 comments · 2 top-level

gmueckl7y ago· 2 in thread

The lack of good tooling for SVN is because git is so utterly inadequate at doing it's job. So this created a need for a ton of tools that pave over those flaws and now the resulting ecosystem is a money making machine.

jogjayrOP7y ago

You're saying git is so bad that an ecosystem sprung up to support it? But if it's so bad why would it have a large enough userbase to support that ecosystem? That logic seems backwards.

gmueckl7y ago

The initial users came because of an enormous hype fueled by "Linus made a VCS" and a weird quasi-religious belief in the community that it is better than anything else in that space. Crazy times back then, really.

jdc05897y ago· 1 in thread

> most of the time you don't need branches on the server side

what?

jogjayrOP7y ago

You're better off releasing from trunk/head/master than cutting a release branch. And if you are cutting a release branch, you don't need to merge it so SVN branching is adequate, if still unpleasant and awful to use. The only other use-case for server-side branches is collaborating with team-mates on a long-lived feature. Feature flags work well enough for this and you should probably be using them anyway.

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