Comment by raxxorrax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raxxorrax | Hacker News Reader

I think for developers it is already as popular. I also like SVN though even with its flaws (apart from performance in larger projects, having a .svn folder everywhere is my biggest gripe).

I think git popularized versioning systems in the first place as many developers just didn't use them at all.

I hoped that versioning would become more user friendly. I remember offices with non-developers that used tools like Tortoise SVN for Windows, which is just insanely practical. Maybe there are already tools like that for git as well, but I haven't encountered them yet. Instead people use bad cloud sync software, which may solve some additional use cases. Problem is that most of these services are trash with bad performance.

But in the end, if SVN is used by non-developers it would still provide a massive benefit, it doesn't have to be git.

> apart from performance in larger projects, having a .svn folder everywhere is my biggest gripe

Working copy has only one .svn directory at its root in up-to-date Subversion client versions. The mentioned problem was fixed in SVN 1.7 (released in 2011).

> I think git popularized versioning systems in the first place as many developers just didn't use them at all.

It was not git. GitHub, its marketing and PR popularized git and version control in general. I think that before GitHub main focus was on versioning source code (recall SCM, source control management system). But the focus switched to universal version control (code + all non code assets).

Heh, shows how long I didn't use SVN anymore. But sure, I never really had a complained and used it quite extensively. But my surroundings often switched to git so I gave in to peer pressure I guess.

Funny thing is that GitHub almost removes the decentralized nature of git.

>I think git popularized versioning systems in the first place as many developers just didn't use them at all.

I think you didn't know many developers before ~2005[0], maybe? Or perhaps [almost] no professional devs before about then?

I was personally introduced to formal version control in 2004 (as the org I interned with went from CVS[1] to SVN[2]), but pretty much every developer I know was using it way before then

Heck! Forms of version control date back ~60 years at this point[3]

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Subversion

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control

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