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SVN
Raised as a usability problem by 17 people on Hacker News over 20 years (2007–2026), in 15 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Merging branches was so hard the team avoided new branchesUnreviewed
20072026- Commenter never understood SVN, merges were a nightmare, and they corrupted the repo2024-05-21
- Merges in SVN and CVS were very painful, forcing teams to create merge-frequency protocols2024-03-04
- Team struggles with merge conflicts, slow branches, and error-prone conflict resolution2021-07-04
Branching takes too long and merging feels scaryUnreviewed
20072026- Branching is heavyweight and leads to pain later on2025-10-23
- Branching takes too long and merging feels scary, so people avoid it2015-04-06
- Merging and branching are far more difficult and confusing than in git2013-02-20
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 17 complaints
- Every operation needs the server, so it is painful on slow links2026-06-17
- Branching is heavyweight and leads to pain later on2025-10-23
- Commenter never understood SVN, merges were a nightmare, and they corrupted the repo2024-05-21
- Merges in SVN and CVS were very painful, forcing teams to create merge-frequency protocols2024-03-04
- Team struggles with merge conflicts, slow branches, and error-prone conflict resolution2021-07-04
- Easy to accidentally update only part of the repo, leaving an unreproducible mixed state2020-01-07
- Git requires more thinking than SVN did for everyday version control work2019-11-02
- Hard to understand what is happening in tricky or unusual situations2019-11-01
- Merging branches in SVN was so hard the team avoided making new branches2017-12-18
- Branching takes too long and merging feels scary, so people avoid it2015-04-06
- Merge problems couldn't be figured out because users didn't understand what was happening behind the scenes2013-09-26
- Switching branches is slow and needs a server round trip2013-02-20
- Merging and branching are far more difficult and confusing than in git2013-02-20
- Commit window can't be closed without losing the message, forcing re-entry of the message and file selection2012-07-04
- Copying text adds an unwanted link back to the blog2009-10-03
- Svn update merges silently discard data on conflicts with no way to back out2008-11-25
- Setup documentation is confusing and lacks good client options2007-11-20