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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Version Control
  4. Version Control System
  5. Git vs Mercurial vs SVN (Subversion)

Git vs Mercurial vs SVN (Subversion)

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

SVN (Subversion)
SVN (Subversion)
Stacks791
Followers629
Votes43
GitHub Stars614
Forks188
Git
Git
Stacks343.6K
Followers184.2K
Votes6.6K
GitHub Stars57.1K
Forks26.9K
Mercurial
Mercurial
Stacks229
Followers219
Votes105

Git vs Mercurial vs SVN (Subversion): What are the differences?

**Key differences between Git and Mercurial and SVN (Subversion):** 1. **Distributed Architecture**: Git and Mercurial both have a distributed architecture where each developer has a complete copy of the repository. This allows developers to work offline and independently, contributing to a faster and more efficient workflow. On the other hand, SVN follows a centralized architecture, where there is a single repository and developers need to be connected to the server to access the code. This can result in slower operations and limited offline capabilities.
  1. Branching and Merging: Git and Mercurial provide more advanced and flexible branching and merging capabilities compared to SVN. Both Git and Mercurial use lightweight branches, allowing developers to easily create and switch between branches for different features or experiments. They also offer efficient merging algorithms that can handle complex merge scenarios. In contrast, SVN uses heavy branches that are more time-consuming to create and switch between. Merging in SVN can be more error-prone and manual.

  2. Performance: Git and Mercurial tend to have faster performance compared to SVN, especially when it comes to operations such as committing, branching, and merging. This is because Git and Mercurial use local repositories and store changes as lightweight branches, whereas SVN requires communication with a central server for most operations. This can result in slower response times and decreased productivity for larger teams working with SVN.

  3. Ease of Use: Git and Mercurial are often considered more user-friendly compared to SVN. Both Git and Mercurial have intuitive command-line interfaces and provide graphical user interface (GUI) tools for ease of use. They also have better support for features like renaming files, moving files, and handling binary files. In contrast, SVN commands can be more complex and less intuitive, requiring a steeper learning curve for new users.

  4. Community and Ecosystem: Git has a larger community and a more extensive ecosystem compared to Mercurial and SVN. Git is widely adopted and supported by popular hosting platforms like GitHub and GitLab, which provide additional collaboration features and integrations with other tools. Mercurial has a smaller but still active community, while SVN has a more niche user base. The larger community around Git means there is a greater availability of resources, tutorials, and support.

  5. Data Integrity: Git and Mercurial have strong mechanisms to ensure data integrity, as they use cryptographic hashes to verify the integrity of each commit in the repository. This means that it is nearly impossible to tamper with or lose data in these systems. SVN, on the other hand, does not have built-in cryptographic hashes, making it more vulnerable to data corruption or tampering.

In summary, Git and Mercurial provide a more distributed architecture, advanced branching and merging capabilities, better performance, user-friendliness, and a larger community compared to SVN. They also have stronger data integrity mechanisms.

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Advice on SVN (Subversion), Git, Mercurial

Kamaldeep
Kamaldeep

CEO at Zhoustify Agency

Nov 13, 2020

Decided

SVN is much simpler than git for the simple stuff (checking in files and updating them when everyone's online), and much more complex than git for the complicated stuff (branching and merging). Or put another way, git's learning curve is steep up front, and then increases moderately as you do weird things; SVN's learning curve is very shallow up front and then increases rapidly.

If you're storing large files, if you're not branching, if you're not storing source code, and if your team is happy with SVN and the workflow you have, I'd say you should stay on SVN.

If you're writing source code with a relatively modern development practice (developers doing local builds and tests, pre-commit code reviews, preferably automated testing, preferably some amount of open-source code), you should move to git for two reasons: first, this style of working inherently requires frequent branching and merging, and second, your ability to interact with outside projects is easier if you're all comfortable with git instead of snapshotting the outside project into SVN.

83.3k views83.3k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

SVN (Subversion)
SVN (Subversion)
Git
Git
Mercurial
Mercurial

Subversion exists to be universally recognized and adopted as an open-source, centralized version control system characterized by its reliability as a safe haven for valuable data; the simplicity of its model and usage; and its ability to support the needs of a wide variety of users and projects, from individuals to large-scale enterprise operations.

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Mercurial is dedicated to speed and efficiency with a sane user interface. It is written in Python. Mercurial's implementation and data structures are designed to be fast. You can generate diffs between revisions, or jump back in time within seconds.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
614
GitHub Stars
57.1K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
188
GitHub Forks
26.9K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
791
Stacks
343.6K
Stacks
229
Followers
629
Followers
184.2K
Followers
219
Votes
43
Votes
6.6K
Votes
105
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 20
    Easy to use
  • 13
    Simple code versioning
  • 5
    User/Access Management
  • 3
    Complicated code versionioning by Subversion
  • 2
    Free
Cons
  • 7
    Branching and tagging use tons of disk space
Pros
  • 1429
    Distributed version control system
  • 1053
    Efficient branching and merging
  • 959
    Fast
  • 843
    Open source
  • 726
    Better than svn
Cons
  • 16
    Hard to learn
  • 11
    Inconsistent command line interface
  • 9
    Easy to lose uncommitted work
  • 8
    Worst documentation ever possibly made
  • 5
    Awful merge handling
Pros
  • 18
    A lot easier to extend than git
  • 17
    Easy-to-grasp system with nice tools
  • 13
    Works on windows natively without cygwin nonsense
  • 11
    Written in python
  • 9
    Free
Cons
  • 0
    Does not distinguish between local and remote head
  • 0
    Track single upstream only
Integrations
No integrations availableNo integrations available
Windows
Windows
Fedora
Fedora
FreeBSD
FreeBSD
Debian
Debian
Gentoo Linux
Gentoo Linux
Mac OS X
Mac OS X

What are some alternatives to SVN (Subversion), Git, Mercurial?

Plastic SCM

Plastic SCM

Plastic SCM is a distributed version control designed for big projects. It excels on branching and merging, graphical user interfaces, and can also deal with large files and even file-locking (great for game devs). It includes "semantic" features like refactor detection to ease diffing complex refactors.

Pijul

Pijul

Pijul is a free and open source (AGPL 3) distributed version control system. Its distinctive feature is to be based on a sound theory of patches, which makes it easy to learn and use, and really distributed.

DVC

DVC

It is an open-source Version Control System for data science and machine learning projects. It is designed to handle large files, data sets, machine learning models, and metrics as well as code.

Magit

Magit

It is an interface to the version control system Git, implemented as an Emacs package. It aspires to be a complete Git porcelain. While we cannot (yet) claim that it wraps and improves upon each and every Git command, it is complete enough to allow even experienced Git users to perform almost all of their daily version control tasks directly from within Emacs. While many fine Git clients exist, only deserve to be called porcelains.

Replicate

Replicate

It lets you run machine learning models with a few lines of code, without needing to understand how machine learning works.

isomorphic-git

isomorphic-git

It is a pure JavaScript reimplementation of git that works in both Node.js and browser JavaScript environments. It can read and write to git repositories, fetch from and push to git remotes (such as GitHub), all without any native C++ module dependencies.

Gitless

Gitless

Gitless is an experiment to see what happens if you put a simple veneer on an app that changes the underlying concepts. Because Gitless is implemented on top of Git (could be considered what Git pros call a "porcelain" of Git), you can always fall back on Git.

Git Reflow

Git Reflow

Reflow automatically creates pull requests, ensures the code review is approved, and squash merges finished branches to master with a great commit message template.

BitKeeper

BitKeeper

BitKeeper is a fast, enterprise-ready, distributed SCM that scales up to very large projects and down to tiny ones.

Diversion

Diversion

It is a modern, cloud-native version control system. It is built on top of distributed storage and databases, accessible via REST API, and runs on serverless cloud infrastructure. Every repository operation is an API call (commit, branch, merge etc.).

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