# Subversion 54 Hacker News commenters recommended Subversion and 55 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 15 years (4 owners). **Verdict:** Simple, reliable centralized version control with linear revision numbers, praised for large binary files and long uptime. Critics mainly cite painful branching and merging. ## Why people recommend it - Handles large binaries well (4 comments): "SVN was actually quite decent for game development, definitely more robust and (non-technical-) user-friendly than git+lfs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573711)) "IMO Subversion is still the best VCS when you have a lot of large binaries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48007282)) "svn is often considered due to issues that git has with large files" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48579649)) - Straightforward and pleasant to use (4 comments): "SVN was more straightforward to use, but that straightforwardness lost a lot in terms of fidelity." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573164)) "SVN (subversion) was working excellent for my team" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945885)) "I was already pretty happy with svn to be honest" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47767138)) - Simple linear revision numbers (3 comments): "I still love to have my one single unique global revisions number that is linearly increasing with each commit." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48006326)) "its simple linear history model was much easier to understand and use for most people" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49142646)) "I loved the simple increasing numbers of Subversion." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48006514)) - Reliable with almost no downtime (3 comments): "I used subversion for 10 years and don’t ever recall a problem when it was offline" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47731010)) "how their team was able to easily recover from that due to the nature of SVN" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48023150)) "There wasn’t any unscheduled downtime in a decade." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49349583)) ## What people warn about - Branching and merging are painful (3 comments): "the implementation was riddled with problems and quite often the repo entered state where branches cannot merge back to main" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348247)) "Branching in SVN is an ordeal that basically copies the whole project into a new folder" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49142633)) "every Friday I would have to do The Merge, which would usually take most of the day" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135744)) - Centralized, depends on server (2 comments): "no way I'd go back to SVN after git, former are centralized and latter is distributed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49954660)) "Centralized servers worsened the problem by doing everything in a synchronous manner" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45979385)) - Seen as outdated technology (2 comments): "I've seen people who haven't migrated off of SVN do okay (though personally I wouldn't punish myself like that)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50286923)) "which is a dead and dying technology within 15-20 years of it being basically dead in most of tech" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46417769)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Git](https://hackerapproved.com/p/git.md): 814 recommend - [Jujutsu (jj)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jujutsu.md): 335 recommend - [Mercurial](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mercurial.md): 121 recommend - [jj (Jujutsu)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jj.md): 115 recommend - [Fossil](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fossil.md): 106 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Subversion", https://hackerapproved.com/p/subversion/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).