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It seems you're getting a lot of advice to choose Git or Mercurial over Subversion. I haven't used Mercurial, but I have used Git and Subversion for years. I t

It seems you're getting a lot of advice to choose Git or Mercurial over Subversion. I haven't used Mercurial, but I have used Git and Subversion for years. I think Git (or maybe Mercurial) is actually the answer to a different question: "What's the best version control system to use?" Starting with Git, particularly if you're not using OS X, which has better GUI tools for Git, seems to me to be a quick trip to insanity. To get started with version control, I think Subversion is substantially easier. But it's not too hard to try both. Make an account on Github, create a repository, and try it out. If, by tomorrow night, you want to gouge your eyes out with a spoon, try Subversion. (Subversion will definitely make you want to gouge your eyes out too, but not for a few months. Then you can switch to Git!)

philwelch 16y ago
Git would actually be easier, I think, for most people to learn if they didn't already have Subversion experience and hence Subversion ways of doing things coloring their preconceptions. It's a beast of a system though--you have to actually learn how to use it, rather than depend on your intuition and hope that it's usable--but it's worth learning and probably easier than learning 1 or 2 other version control systems and having to unlearn them along the way.
- pingswept 16y ago
  As someone who has been slowly unlearning SVN, I agree. Still, learning Subversion was trivial compared to Git, regardless of which I learned first.