What is the reasoning behind the recommended layout for Subversion repositories?

Question

Version Control with Subversion recommends the following layout for (single-project) repositories (complemented by this question):

/trunk
/tags
  /rel.1 (app         


        

Answer 1

You've described the two pretty much standard models for repository organization: dev-test-prod and trunk-branch. Eric Sink does a nice job of describing them in his Source Control HOWTO. One thing to note is that the way most people use trunk-branch is to create a branch for each version as it is released to customers, which then becomes the maintenance branch.

I would tend to prefer trunk-branch since it doesn't require migrating every single change from development to test to production. Only changes that need to be backported to maintance branches or bugfixes that migrate from the maintance branch to the trunk need to be migrated.

However, one circumstance were dev-test-prod might be preferable is in web development, where the concept of versions released to customers doesn't really exist. Prod, in this case, would be whatever's running on the server right now, while code is being worked on in dev and test and constantly migrated into the application, rather than being released in one big chunk.