91 engineers on Hacker News describe using Subversion first-hand: 13 endorse it, 19 regret it, 2 are mixed.
“I was forced to use both CVS and SVN in a thankfully very distant past”
regret · production · TacticalCoder · 2026-01-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it was otherwise forcing good practice because it doesn't allow you to erase context that may be useful later.”
endorse · production · Izkata · 2025-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We were on SVN until 2020-ish, because, well it worked fine for us.”
endorse · production · crinkly · 2025-07-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Later, projects grew large enough, that SVN became horrible because of how I/O worked on my PCs/networks”
regret · production · throwaway2037 · 2025-06-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I almost cried of happiness when we moved to git from SVN on my first job after being there for 6 months”
regret · production · 0.5 yr · DanielHB · 2025-06-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“On my next team, we moved to svn, which always felt like cvs with better porcelain from a developer perspective”
endorse · production · hoistbypetard · 2024-07-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It was the quickest and easiest approach at the time (that I knew of) and worked well.”
endorse · production · jwcooper · 2023-01-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“One place where Subversion historically did better with respect to merging is avoiding merging by allowing you to lock files. We use this”
endorse · production · criddell · 2022-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At work, we switched from SVN to Mercurial, and from Mercurial to Git. ... just don't bring back SVN!”
regret · production · GuB-42 · 2022-06-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Rollbacks in prod? Handled by SVN rollbacks.”
endorse · production · b112 · 2020-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Having used subversion and git in big teams... SVN never again.”
regret · production · xwolfi · 2020-05-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I worked in a company that had at least 100 repos... and was managing it well using svn.”
endorse · production · mumblemumble · 2020-04-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“constant complaining about SVN which I truly hate”
regret · production · axegon_ · 2020-03-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it's quite a bit less useful than svn was for us.”
endorse · production · 10 yr · thewebcount · 2020-03-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Then we moved to svn. You had productivity issues of all sorts, mainly with branching and merging.”
regret · production · icedchai · 2019-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use git for all our code and svn for our electrical design files. These work reasonably well for engineers but not for non-engineers”
mixed · production · matt_the_bass · 2018-06-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“With svn, I think I was the only one who could merge and it would be rare and added product risk.”
regret · production · prepend · 2018-04-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My company uses SVN. SVN works fine so there isn't really a reason to spend the man hours migrating”
endorse · production · 15 yr · astura · 2018-04-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Subversion doesn't back up until you commit and people don't commit anywhere near quickly enough”
regret · production · candiodari · 2017-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we were saddled with bad I.T. ... Bugzilla, and Subversion”
regret · production · nwatson · 2015-09-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“every operation was faster in git”
regret · production · latj · 2015-03-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we did a trial using subversion which gained a lot of traction.”
endorse · production · emcrazyone · 2014-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was using SVN for my job, which was crap (big code base, everything was super sluggish and branching and merging was an absolute nightmare).”
regret · production · stephen_g · 2014-02-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the only reason SVN is preferred over Git is because of externals... It works great for us and we cannot see any reason why we should move away from this.”
endorse · production · passfree · 2013-11-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Things I have become an expert in that are now useless to me and probably not valued by an employer”
regret · production · pkteison · 2013-10-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We just migrated our source control system from Visual SourceSafe to - wait for it - SVN. It's a gigantic leap forward!”
endorse · production · scrumper · 2012-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I sadly still have to use SVN for some things and have been using Versions for quite some time now.”
regret · personal · jc4p · 2011-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“SVN export didn't perform correctly (still don't know why), and one of the files was messed up.”
regret · production · rorrr · 2011-11-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“SVN more then suited our build and deployment strategies.”
endorse · production · mey · 2011-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I would never go back to SVN.”
regret · production · bad_user · 2011-10-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I can't speak for the grandparent, but we use a similar system here and also on SVN... SVN merge issues are a pain”
mixed · production · Goosey · 2010-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My work still uses svn (mostly), so I've been using git-svn.”
regret · production · natep · 2010-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“seems a lot less painful than the frontend guys using SVN.”
regret · production · adam-_- · 2010-10-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to git to try to get out of the hell that was svn merging between long-lived branches.”
regret · production · zrail · 2010-08-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“svn was the day to day system when I started.”
neutral · production · Macha · 2026-09-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I migrated out cvs to a beta release of Subversion. We only used branches for releases.”
neutral · production · jillesvangurp · 2026-09-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When we switched from CVS to SVN I had to show ROI”
neutral · production · bandrami · 2026-06-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In SVN they deleted it and no one ended up caring, but in Git of course it became part of the repo history.”
neutral · production · danudey · 2026-06-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“moving a massive, complex SVN repository into multiple separate Git repositories”
neutral · production · danudey · 2026-06-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've also done cvs -> svn -> git. All the commits have survived migration.”
neutral · production · Izkata · 2026-06-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“One of the companies I worked for had self-hosted subversion hosting and accessing it required connecting to a VPN first.”
neutral · production · LexiMax · 2025-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Tooling, integrations, and automation (Including CI) were all things we used at my work when we switched from CVS to SVN almost 20 years ago.”
neutral · production · aidenn0 · 2025-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We got some moaning when we moved to SVN too at how much better the old system was.”
neutral · production · mattmanser · 2025-05-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I never again used anything else unless forced -- typically Subversion, mostly for inertia reasons.”
neutral · production · emmelaich · 2025-04-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When we started, we had one SVN repo that everyone shared --- that was a mono repo”
neutral · production · toast0 · 2024-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we were doing SVN to our own servers because this dude Joel put it as part of a checklist”
neutral · production · muzani · 2024-02-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“for nearly 10 years since switching from SVN. My first 5 years was just like you said. Commit, pull, commit, pull.”
neutral · personal · withinboredom · 2024-01-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Then we moved to git from svn but kept everything else the same.”
neutral · production · Jenk · 2024-01-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used to use a GUI when working with TFS, CVS, and SVN.”
neutral · production · wolpoli · 2023-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated to Subversion and never had another issue.”
neutral · production · KerrAvon · 2023-07-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“followed by SVN a few years later. I still use git like a fancy subversion”
neutral · production · ianmcgowan · 2023-01-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“There was no direct importer from cvs to git, so we had to go through Subversion as an intermediate.”
neutral · production · ridiculous_fish · 2022-09-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used subversion for a long time and was resistant to moving ardour.org to use git instead.”
neutral · production · PaulDavisThe1st · 2022-06-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we've moved to GitLab internally (from SVN, granted)”
neutral · production · danudey · 2021-09-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Then we switched to SVN and nothing much changed except we established a way to hold locks on files while they were being changed.”
neutral · production · rapjr9 · 2021-06-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used CVS and later SVN for years before I used git”
neutral · personal · kelnos · 2020-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated from SVN to Git at the beginning of 2018”
neutral · production · hyperpape · 2020-03-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Surely you can convert the svn repository to git with history intact?”
neutral · production · fredrik-j · 2020-03-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched from SVN to Git about a year and a half ago.”
neutral · production · remmargorp64 · 2020-03-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Over the year I've used CVS, SVN, bazaar, Mercurial and Git.”
neutral · personal · ldng · 2019-08-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“SVN reports a linecount of just over 37 million at the moment”
neutral · production · Insanity · 2018-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the two of us that knew git and SVN were desperately searching for the consistency and tools we had in git”
neutral · personal · bipson · 2018-09-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We had teams using SVN and teams using HG. Phab supports them all.”
neutral · production · maktouch · 2018-06-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Trying to go from SVN to git left me confused and frustrated, while I found it much easier to switch to hg.”
neutral · personal · bblough · 2016-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We currently have 400 people with rights, I suspect we lost a few when we migrated from self-hosted SVN to GitHub.”
neutral · production · MatthewWilkes · 2016-09-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“coming from our subversion background”
neutral · production · michaelt · 2016-04-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated over a ton of legacy svn repos.”
neutral · production · SystemOut · 2015-01-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If you use some sort of versioning (we used SVN), you'll have to separate your code from your workspace.”
neutral · personal · CookWithMe · 2014-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I wasn't able to use SVN when the occasion arose, but otherwise there has been no reason to regret going with this Chromebook.”
neutral · personal · robgibbons · 2014-11-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I also think it predates our switching to git from subversion...”
neutral · production · keysersosa · 2014-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated SVN exactly the same way.”
neutral · production · roller · 2014-05-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“And this is how we "migrated" to SVN.”
neutral · production · anton_gogolev · 2014-05-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched over to git from svn recently at work”
neutral · production · wambotron · 2014-03-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When we switched to Git, I had my team (pretty small) basically treat Git like SVN for a little while.”
neutral · production · MBCook · 2014-02-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've struggled in moving from SVN/TFS to GIT, but it's been worthwhile”
neutral · production · tracker1 · 2013-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use subversion, git and mercurial internally.”
neutral · production · mrmekon · 2011-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched from SVN to Mercurial around 6 months ago”
neutral · production · MetaMan · 2011-09-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“GIT/HG/SVN or whatever other source control system for my own stuff. I usually branch/tag off a version from trunk”
neutral · personal · boyter · 2011-08-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We moved to SVN a couple years later when another new programmer said CVS was crap.”
neutral · production · varikin · 2011-06-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“using Subversion as intended, in your case and ours, would be 1/10th as painful even while introducing a few issues of its own.”
neutral · production · bluedanieru · 2011-04-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“With FishEye it integrates a view on our subversion repositories into that”
neutral · production · Confusion · 2011-02-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This is using SVN though. I wonder how it compares to a git workflow.”
neutral · production · lt · 2010-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“in an environment where the central repo is subversion.”
neutral · production · aufreak3 · 2010-10-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we have some subversion-based code trees knocking around too.”
neutral · production · _b8r0 · 2010-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have build scripts for phing, exports from subversion, migrates the database, loads stored procs”
neutral · production · atstsolutions · 2010-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Trunks (http://www.trunksapp.com) to host our SVN repos, then have post-commit hook”
neutral · production · bkorte · 2010-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“A somewhat complete list of tools we use in our startup:”
neutral · production · Maro · 2010-10-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Too many times in my SVN days I witnessed strange bugs appearing in some commits that otherwise only contained whitespace changes”
neutral · production · pilif · 2010-01-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?