What do “branch”, “tag” and “trunk” mean in Subversion repositories?

Question

I\'ve seen these words a lot around Subversion (and I guess general repository) discussions.
I have been using SVN for my projects for the last few year

Answer 1

They don't really have any formal meaning. A folder is a folder to SVN. They are a generally accepted way to organize your project.

• The trunk is where you keep your main line of developmemt. The branch folder is where you might create, well, branches, which are hard to explain in a short post.

• A branch is a copy of a subset of your project that you work on separately from the trunk. Maybe it's for experiments that might not go anywhere, or maybe it's for the next release, which you will later merge back into the trunk when it becomes stable.

• And the tags folder is for creating tagged copies of your repository, usually at release checkpoints.

But like I said, to SVN, a folder is a folder. branch, trunk and tag are just a convention.

I'm using the word 'copy' liberally. SVN doesn't actually make full copies of things in the repository.