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

Mercurial vs SVN (Subversion)

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

SVN (Subversion)
SVN (Subversion)
Stacks791
Followers629
Votes43
GitHub Stars614
Forks188
Mercurial
Mercurial
Stacks229
Followers219
Votes105

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

Introduction

Mercurial and SVN (Subversion) are both version control systems that help developers track and manage changes to their code. While they serve the same purpose, there are key differences between the two.

  1. Centralized vs Distributed: The main difference between Mercurial and SVN lies in their architecture. SVN follows a centralized model, where there is a central repository that stores the code history and acts as a single point of truth. In contrast, Mercurial is a distributed version control system, where each developer has their own local copy of the code repository, including its history. This allows for greater flexibility and enables offline work in Mercurial.

  2. Branching and Merging: When it comes to branching and merging, Mercurial offers a more streamlined and efficient workflow compared to SVN. Mercurial encourages the use of lightweight and isolated branches, making it easier to create, manage, and merge branches. SVN, on the other hand, uses a copy-modify-merge approach, which can lead to more complex and time-consuming merge conflicts.

  3. Performance: Mercurial is known for its speed and performance, especially for common operations such as cloning and updating repositories. The internal design of Mercurial is optimized for efficiency, resulting in faster operations even with larger codebases. SVN, while still efficient, may experience slower performance for certain operations, especially when the codebase grows significantly.

  4. Integrity and Safety: Both Mercurial and SVN ensure the integrity and safety of code changes. However, Mercurial employs a strict immutability model, where once a changeset is committed, it cannot be modified or deleted. This guarantees the integrity and traceability of the codebase over time. SVN, on the other hand, allows for slightly more flexibility in modifying and deleting committed changes, which may be desirable in certain scenarios but can also introduce risks.

  5. Ease of Use: Mercurial aims to provide a user-friendly and intuitive interface, making it easier for developers to learn and use. The commands and workflows in Mercurial are designed to be natural and consistent, reducing the learning curve for new users. SVN, while still straightforward, may require some additional learning for newcomers due to its slightly different command structure and workflows.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Both Mercurial and SVN have active communities, but SVN has a larger user base and ecosystem. This means there are more resources, plugins, and tools available for SVN, making it easier to find support and extend its functionality. Mercurial, although having a smaller community, still offers a robust set of features and extensions, but the overall ecosystem may be more limited compared to SVN.

In summary, Mercurial and SVN differ in their architecture (centralized vs distributed), branching and merging workflows, performance, integrity and safety approaches, ease of use, and community/ecosystem size.

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Advice on SVN (Subversion), 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)
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.

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
-
GitHub Forks
188
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
791
Stacks
229
Followers
629
Followers
219
Votes
43
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
  • 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
    Track single upstream only
  • 0
    Does not distinguish between local and remote head
Integrations
No 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), Mercurial?

Git

Git

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.

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.

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