(EDIT: As many of you noticed, this was indeed an April Fool's Day prank. We love Git, it's the center part of what we do and SVN could not possibly work inside VersionPress.)

When we started developing VersionPress, Git seemed like an obvious choice: we used it for our other software projects, GitHub was widely popular back then (and still is) and we simply didn't have too many reasons to consider other alternatives. However, over the years, we've regretted this decision many times and finally came to the conclusion that it's time to do something about it.

So, later this month, we'll start converting VersionPress to use Subversion (SVN) internally. Yay!

Why Subversion

Subversion is a natural choice for a WordPress project. The WP core team uses it for development, most people are familiar with it, it uses simple concepts like numbering commits 1, 2, 3 instead of bcdee8d, 5f61e74 etc., the tools are supported natively on all operating systems (unlike Git which is ported to Windows and to this date quite slower than its Linux counterpart), etc.

Also, Subversion is client-server by default which means that we wouldn't need to worry about how to synchronize local WP sites with their remote clones, it would simply work because there would be a single repo and then just several working copies of it. It just sounds so obvious now…

Action plan

Moving from Git to SVN will not be easy. Version control is a very deep component of what we do so it will take some time to make the change. Right now, we're finishing VersionPress 3.0 where the change will certainly not happen but right after that, we'll start working on the transition.

VersionPress 4.0 will be the first release to proudly use SVN. It will make a lot of things easier down the road and we're really happy to finally make this decision. What took us so long, right?