Solo devs maybe. Merging and branching are so much worse in svn that it’s not good enough for “most developers”, aka those working on professional projects with a team of developers. Sure we used to make do with svn, but I have no desire to go back.
Git doesn't even technically have branches, just pointers to commits which can easily get mixed up, go headless and fail out in ways that just never happened in SVN.
And rebasing a branch with several commits can be a nightmare since you have to re-merge almost (but not exactly) the same code over and over again at whatever state it was in at some time in the past when some previous commit happened - unless you abort out and squash first. In SVN, you just merged the whole branch once and when both were in their final current state.
Of course, git's a lot more powerful, but with that comes complexity. SVN branching and merging was a snap comparatively.
* https://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.10.html#c...
* https://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.11.html#c...
I mean, if that's a reason to say git doesn't technically have branches, then neither does svn. It has subdirectories that you can make copies of at any level, and copy commits between them at any level, such that you can make an amazing repo-within-a-repo mess not possible in git.
Sure, CVS was limited but it was reliable and straightforward.
It was so reliable that people complained about SVN using a DB (Berkeley DB) as backend, as manual fixing of CVS files was a "normal" part of operation and people didn't believe that might not be needed ...
Like I’m gonna bother to set up a Subversion remote for every little repo that I create for myself.
This means you usually only have one svn repo, and you set it up the way you like. As an example, you may set things up so you can checkout:
server:/proj/small/hello - to get a single project
server:/proj/small- to get all small projects
server:/proj - to get all projects
If you already have one of those checked out, adding new project is as simple as "mkdir bar", "svn add bar", "svn commit". So juch easier than making new github repo. And multi-level hierarchical project nesting is still something impossible in git.
Were you paying attention to what I just wrote!? `git init`. What do I need a remote on the Internet for?
But yes, if all your work is on one machine, and you have backups of it, there is not much point in svn.