3. Git vs. Subversion

It’s help­ful to be able to com­pare one ver­sion con­trol sys­tem to anoth­er as a way of map­ping com­mands and approach­es. While we shouldn’t try to repli­cate all of SVN in Git — because this would sell Git short and lim­it the ben­e­fits of switch­ing from SVN to Git — it will be ben­e­fi­cial for us to com­pare the major func­tion­al­i­ty and com­mands of the two systems.

To some, the idea of using SVN in the 2020s may seem odd. Yes, Git is now the most wide­ly used ver­sion con­trol sys­tem. How­ev­er, Sub­ver­sion still has a strong­hold in many com­pa­nies, espe­cial­ly with lega­cy projects in the enter­prise. I wrote this mate­r­i­al in 2017 for a gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tion who was tran­si­tion­ing to Git from SVN. This orga­ni­za­tion does amaz­ing things on this earth and beyond. I can assure you that a lot of projects are still man­aged with Git.

With that said, let’s jump into the com­par­i­son of Git and SVN.