Can we finally move to DVCS in Corporate Software? Is SVN still a 'must have' for development? [closed]

Question

Git/Mercurial have been becoming more and more popular. I have seen plenty of articles comparing SVN with Git/Mercurial, but I am wondering if there is really any reason to still use SVN. It seems like there are plenty of tools for Git/Mercurial now which should help spread its corporate adoption.

Are there any reasons to still use SVN? Is Mercurial/Git finally ready for corporate adoption?

Answer 1

On the one hand, SVN integration (with IDE, frameworks, wikis, ...) is very mature, as well as its GUIs and code browsers (even though DVCS like Git and Mercurial progress every day).

On the other hand, introducing a DVCS in an Enterprise environment is still not a trivial task:

• Some requirements are not easily met (in terms of security and access control, administration and restriction of access)
• The DVCS paradigm is more complex to understand, with lots of pros and cons.
• You really need to leverage its many workflows instead of relying on the SVN centralized one.
• The transition from CVCS to DVCS is difficult

---

Just to be clear, using a DVCS can be a very valid choice:

• for a new project, where the developers are not tied with legacy tools or processes
• especially when the developers are not geographically located in the same place (often the case with open-source development, which is why DVCS are mainly used there).

StackOverflow (not an open source project) is using Mercurial (see HgInit, written by Joel Spolsky).
They migrated from SVN to a DVCS:

• in part because their developers are now all over the world(!)

• and also because the merge facilities of a DVCS are much more advanced than in SVN.
  (which they need to maintain many parallel slightly different versions of their code base, between SO sites, StackExchange sites V1 and V2, Area 51, ...)
  See "differences between DVCS and CVCS", or "What are the benefits of Mercurial or git over svn for branching/merging?".

• For a corporate environment (where I am), any transition of any kind is not trivial, because it need to be:

  • funded (money, even if the tools are free)
  • supported (that means having the right people with the right competences)
  • integrated (with existing legacy tools, GUIs, IDEs like a Visual Studio or many others, ...)
  • administrated (in term of common servers, even for a DVCS)
  • documented (especially for users coming with a CVCS like SVN background)

So DVCS can also be very useful in a corporate environment:
(See "Corporate adoption rate of Git?" or "Git-Based Source Control in the Enterprise: Suggested Tools and Practices?".)
It is (even for new projects) simply not as easily put in place than in a smaller structure or in open-source environments.

Answer 2

Is it considered better for a single developer?

If anything, Subversion is worse for a single developer (more troublesome to setup).

But a good reason to keep using SVN is inertia. If SVN works fine for your project (or in your company), there is no need to go through the pains of switching over. There might be some training costs involved in teaching everyone the new tools (and new workflows), with no real benefits.