[directionless]

I remember this differently. SVN had great _branching_ but horrific merge support. They resisted improvements to merging, because they wanted something theoretically perfect.

Git came along with great merge support and the entire world loved it.

[sebazzz]

Global ignores also came quite late for svn. Until then you needed to add a svn:ignore property to the root directory and then apply it recursively (which then could go wrong).