I read their Jira thread, and I was convinced it was a joke, too. The project manager mentioned some poll that no one else had heard of, and then other people kept coming up with reasons as to why it made sense to have had a short poll for such a major issue. I just assumed they were stringing everyone else along. :P

Honestly, if this isn't a joke, I think it doesn't really make SVN look bad (or dead). SVN's remaining proponents keep arguing that it works well in a corporate environment, while they agree that git is better for large, open-source projects. Well, SVN is a large, open-source project.

I'm still betting it's a joke, though.

Tony Stevenson, on the Apache infrastructure team, seems to think it is:

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?page=com.at...

Given the competition between SVN and Git, this would be a very poor choice for an April fool's joke. You don't put out false information that makes you look like you're ceding to your chief competitor, when you're in the weaker position.