Why to use SVN? Any hidden pros (over GIT/Mercurial/Bazaar) there? [duplicate]

I'm currently maintaining a version control service for a U.S. research institution. We're not only supporting SVN in addition to Git and Mercurial, but also CVS.

SVN's "killer feature" among our users is narrow clones. You can make a checkout of just one subdirectory deep in a heirarchy, download only the files related to that directory, and still be able to make commits. Git very recently gave a similar, but not quite as useful variation on this feature called sparse checkouts (see also Sparse checkout in Git 1.7.0?). This lets you filter your working tree, but still forces you to download the entire history of the entire project, which can be prohibitive even when large binaries aren't involved. Mind you, disk is cheap, and if you absorb the hit of the initial clone in advance subsequent pulls are quick enough, but this doesn't help people that went on a trip before they realized they needed to clone, and in any case even Git's sparse checkouts won't let you start your working tree five levels down, so it looks a bit ugly.

In addition, users find authz files easier to write than Git commit hooks, are more comfortable with the SVN syntax and methodology than any DVCS, and perhaps most importantly of all, already have many thousands of commits worth of history in SVN. Experiments in migrating large Subversion repositories to Git or Mercurial have provided mixed results, and these are scientists trying to get work done on their own projects, not donating their time to development of a DVCS.

CVS still has a following for a similar reason. Imagine, as a Git user, having sparse checkouts that also allow you to arbitrarily remap where files in the branch show up in your working tree, using a format that is versioned along with the repository and is distributed with every usual pull, that allows you to write definitions that can have groups that can include other groups, and that only pulls down the files necessary for filesystem placement on a clone. That's straightforward in CVS modules, and impossible in every DVCS. For all the sins of CVS (and believe me, we're quite aware of them, and go out of our way to discourage new CVS projects unless they absolutely can't live without modules), it's impossible to convince a group using that feature to migrate to another version control system.

DVCS software has brought some awesome innovations, but they're also missing things that some developers take for granted. Make sure you know in advance what your requirements are before choosing one.

Talking about the company I work for — the biggest reason for using SVN is being able to keep huge, proprietary format, binary files under version control. Specifically, libraries of thousands of CAD files. In this instance, it does make sense to have the VCS be file-based like SVN is, rather than textual-information-based like Git.

Putting aside whether or not you can do shallow "checkouts" with Git, or how well it stores binary data, the fact is that it's designed to track lines of textual information floating around a tree of source code. As well as it does this, that model is not suited to tracking libraries of binary data.

Honestly though, that's about the only solid reason I would recommend it :P

SVN is established and mature, with equally mature tooling.