I'm a fan of SVN over Git.

Why? Because SVN was much easier for a single developer or small team, and git (specifically msysgit) left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

When I was interning at a small shop, I was introduced to git on Windows. I immediately noticed the amount of work it took to get it to work with Github. First, I had to generate a ssh private key, paste the public key in Github, then bring up pageant and open my private key each time I wanted to push, which was extremely annoying.

And I never really liked that I was pulling down the entire repository. I will admit that I never worked with anything huge, but I would be afraid to download KDE's repository in Git if the entire repo and its revisions are on my HD.

Then there was the confusing process to make a commit. TMK, I had to first "stage" all the files I wanted to commit (which sucked when you had many many files, took me a while to find the manual command to stage everything), then do the commit, then push to the main repo (why is that a separate operation?!).

You also had the not(!) very helpful commit data. Oh look, this is commit 14f74433245ae17aeeaa part of tree 2167a4934d0a4a7db0de and parent d7042abb4821d3faf600. The hell does that mean? I should be able to figure out things pretty quickly and not have to consult some weird documentation.

Speaking of documentation, at least when I was using it, it seemed everything was in linux man file format, IE confusing and useless to me. I rarely could find much help in the docs and simply resorted to google.

And with commits, the one thing that I didn't like was the lack of version numbers. Now I know that this is because of the design of git, but any software needs a version number. I still remember the marker commits that would pop up saying "Changed version to 1.8.6" or something similar, but you still couldn't do build numbers. To me having the version be 1.8.6.5164 (last part is revision number) tells me a lot more than simply 1.8.6 and a note saying that something minor changed, try it

Getting software specific, the base program on Windows is msysgit, which is a terrible interface. It locked up on me a few times, had a horrible interface, and CLI-GUI integration was iffy at best. The command line junkies around me hated the gui even more.

Now lets look at SVN. And since I'm on Windows and have a google account, specifically TourtiseSVN and Google Code.

First, complete shell integration to do everything on the repository (and for you linux people, RabbitVCS does the same thing), no main GUI needed. Getting a repository is easy as a checkout, no SSH needed (can't remember if Github required SSH for pulls), and no entire repo + all past commits sitting on your HD.

Committing is extremal easy, mainly because no SSH or staging is required. You simply check all the files you want using the very helpful select all option that in my msysgit version wasn't available, type in a commit message, and hit commit. Google Code then asks you for your login information (which most clients store), and your done. Simple, easy, and no SSH

Version numbers? With some easy code, you can add a version number and a commit number to all checkouts, which makes things so much easier. You also get usable version numbers that actually show a change, eg 1.8.6.5165 is newer than 1.8.6.5164.

Documentation? Well, its hard to say. Tortoise is documented, but I haven't actually referred to the official documentation in such a long time that I can't judge. Reading a simple intro guide was enough for me.

Merging is something else I can't compare. I had to do it once in Git when somebody else committed a change to a file I was working on, but never in SVN.

Which one would I recommend? Well in large teams, git does have its advantages, mainly in its non-linear development cycle. In another project I saw 4 programmers start in separate branches, then merge all the code in very strange ways that somehow morphed into the final master branch. Github and msysgit had a really nice visualization tool for the whole project that I really liked.

For single developer or small team projects, SVN would be the best since most of Gits features aren't used and your only getting its negative parts. Simplicity is such a nice thing