https://github.blog/2023-01-20-sunsetting-subversion-support/

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Sunsetting Subversion support

On January 8, 2024, GitHub will remove support for Subversion.

Sunsetting Subversion support
Author
Matt CooperMatt Cooper
January 20, 2023

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Hello from Git Systems, the team that works on the Subversion
subsystem at GitHub.

As of January 8, 2024 (about a year from now), we will sunset
Subversion support completely on GitHub.com. A release of GitHub
Enterprise Server sometime in early 2024 will also remove Subversion
support. Read on for more details.

In 2010, when GitHub introduced Subversion support, the version
control landscape was very different. Many customers were using
centralized version control systems. Subversion was already 10 years
old and in good company with other centralized systems, while Git was
still a relative newcomer. At that point in time, it was not yet
clear that distributed version control would eventually take over,
and even less clear that Git would be the dominant system. By
natively supporting Subversion on top of a Git backend, GitHub made
it easier for customers to move to Git while changing their workflows
over in a gradual way.

Fast forward to now, and wow, have things changed. Git enjoys up to
94% usage by developers, and Subversion is a lot rarer in the wild
than it used to be. Our traffic numbers inside GitHub back this up:
fewer than 0.02% of requests made to the Git backend come through a
Subversion endpoint, and only about 5,000 repositories see even a
single Subversion request each month. It's clear that Subversion
support is no longer helping people migrate to Git.

But hey, if the Subversion system just works and doesn't bother
anyone, there's no reason to make any changes, right? The reality is
that there's an ongoing maintenance cost to any software, and that
goes extra for public-facing services on the internet. As the use of
GitHub has evolved and the number of Subversion requests has declined
dramatically, we plan to focus our efforts entirely on Git.

Why do people still use Subversion on GitHub, anyhow? Besides simple
inertia, there were workflows which Git didn't support until
recently. The main thing we heard when speaking with customers and
communities was checking out a subset of the repository-a single
directory, or only the latest commit. I have good news: with sparse
checkout, sparse index, and partial clone, Git can now do a pretty
decent job at these workflows.

We will maintain Subversion support until January 8, 2024 on
GitHub.com. After that date, it will be turned off and removed. Late
in 2023, we'll run a few hours-long and then day-long brownouts to
help flush out any remaining use of the feature. The next version of
GitHub Enterprise Server to ship after January 8, 2024, will also
remove Subversion support.

Tags:

  * Subversion

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