What is version control?

Version Control Systems like Git, SVN, CVS, Mercurial are software tools that can be useful. They help the developer team to manage changes in the source code. When a mistake happens, developers can turn back the time and compare earlier versions and states. It helps them to fix errors while minimizing disruption to all team members.

Git and SVN are the two most common Version Control Systems. Both of them have pros and cons.

Categories of Version Control Systems.

We can categorize the Version Control Systems into three types.

1. Local Version Control System
2. Centralized Version Control System
3. Distributed Version Control System

About GIT Version Control

Git is the most common Version Control System among developers nowadays. Based on the categories above, it belongs to the third category. So it is a Distributed Version Control System.

It is installed on a workstation and acts as a client and a server. Every developer has a local copy of the whole version history of the project on their machine. Git changes happen locally. So, the developers do not need to have a constant internet connection. When a developer has the code on the local workstation, the local operations are faster. 

About SVN Version Control

SVN belongs to the second category above. So it is a Centralized Version Control System. It means you need an internet connection to work with SVN. It has a separate server and client. Only the files a developer is working on are available on the local machine, and the developer must be online, working with the server. Users check out files and commit changes back to the server. 

The Clash of the two VCS!

Performance

When it comes to Git vs. SVN performance, the client-server model of SVN outperforms with larger files and codebases because SVN does not have issues with binary files compression. However, GIT is much faster with smaller files mainly because developers commit the changes locally, and they do not have to push the code to the remote server every time.

Permission

Git assumes that all the contributors have the same permissions. 

SVN allows you to specify, read and write access controls per file-level and per-directory level. 

Availability

Unlike SVN, Git can work offline, allowing your team to continue working without losing features if they lose connection.

Single Point Failure

If the SVN central repository goes down or some code breaks the build, no one can commit their code until the repository recovers. With Git, developers can continue the work locally. They can commit the code, but the push can happen when the central repository works again.

Conclusion & Closing

This post is a quick comparison of the most common version control systems. Pros and cons and in which situation we should prefer one or the other. Anyway, this one is another good comparison if you are interested.