I personally used Mercurial and Subversion in a limited way and I just can’t see why 95% of the people will chose SVN over something else. Is it just a monopoly case or is there a lot of good hidden in SVN that other systems don’t have?
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I personally used Mercurial and Subversion in a limited way and I just can’t see why 95% of the people will chose SVN over something else. Is it just a monopoly case or is there a lot of good hidden in SVN that other systems don’t have?
It is free, is open source, has good documentation, is widely used, simple/easy to use, has a significant functionality set, available on lots of platforms, support available.
There is not much more that you can ask of a piece of software.
EDIT I know it is not as good as other tools at dealing with branching and merging – but many people either get by with it or work with the tool to avoid the merging.
One of the other reasons is that the conceptual model matches that of CVS and SourceSafe – so people do not have to grasp a different way of thinking about source control and changes. (Like Hg and Git so)
I am certainly not claiming that SVN is better than those – just giving an answer to why it is popular.