[xorcist]

You could always keep a local svn repository and commit to that, if you really wanted to commit without connectivity. But in practice most people don't, as evidenced by the success of github, which grinds many development processes to a halt every time it is down.

It also ignores svk, which is (was?) a popular add-on to svn, which provided a convenient way to do this and replay all the commits to the central svn repository when connectivity allowed.

[badsectoracula]

The thing with Subversion's native support for the feature is that it is, well, native. No workarounds (using a local svn repo is extremely clunky) or external tools needed, the feature is part of the normal official workflow.

The issue isn't that it was technically impossible to do this before, it is that it wasn't something available out of the box back when it mattered. The feature was added several years after Git's dominance and by that point few people cared about Subversion.

[xorcist]

While not native, svk got pretty popular already in 2005, at a time when git was not used much outside LKML. Github wouldn't be released for a couple more years, which had a huge part in git dominance. Bazaar, darcs, Mercurial were all somewhat popular, but a pretty common question was what the killer feature really was that svn couldn't do.