SVN has already lost mind share with the real hackers, the thought leaders like Linus Torvalds - It's the new COBOL of the open source version systems. The decentralized version control systems that are open source are really pushing version control systems in new directions.They are addressing important questions about the committer/non-committer divide, which SVN only perpetuates (at least with open source projects).
BTW,should corporate spiels be posted here ? I agree that Collabnet deserves some credit for sponsoring dev of SVN. But is this the appropriate forum for a post like this ?
Subversion is a big improvement over CVS, but it still has some problems. Perhaps the biggest is the difficulty of making branches, and keeping them in sync with the trunk (which requires keeping track of revision numbers by hand in the comments). There have been many times I've wanted to make a branch but just couldn't summon the mental energy to do it.
I've found darcs to be a significant improvement over Subversion. As one example, here's how to make a branch using darcs:
$ cp -r my_proj_trunk my_proj_branch
Then running
$ darcs pull ../my_proj_trunk
in my_proj_branch keeps you in sync with the trunk.
The next revision (1.5) will have branch/merge tracking. It will also have sparse checkouts so you don't need to get the entire repository to do real work.
I've used SVN on a LARGE project where the repository got to well over 200gigs of data over 3000 revisions. I was very impressed with its performance.
My biggest beef with SVN is that I can't checkout from the repository and have it automatically know when I delete or add files and directories. That is, I have to remember to use 'svn rm' instead of just 'rm'.
I don't want all my random files like object files and temp files getting added to the repository. You can implement this for yourself though, using the output of "svn status".
BTW,should corporate spiels be posted here ? I agree that Collabnet deserves some credit for sponsoring dev of SVN. But is this the appropriate forum for a post like this ?