What do you use the svn tags directory for anyways?

Question

Ok so we all know the standard SVN set-up of

trunk\\
branches\\
tags\\

And I realize that the recommendation is that tags should have \"spe

Answer 1

Tags are supposed to reference immutable "version of the application" of a set of files.
("version of the application" as opposed to "technical internal version number used by the VCS", like revision for SVN, or SHA-1 for Git, or id for ClearCase, or...)
They are supposed to serve as reference to be queried and deployed in another workspace (for testing or UAT - User Acceptance Tests -)

Since SVN implements tags like branches: as directory, the incentive to modify files in a tag can be strong, but would defeat the purpose of a tag. Other VCS has the notion of label (or "baseline") which, once set, can not be moved anymore.

To which George Mauer comments:

Well thats kind of what I was saying. Tags should never be changed so its a very...odd to implement them as branches.

"implements" ? But they did not "implemented" the notion of tag. SVN has no "tag" per se. They just reused their branches and said it could be also used as a tag.

SVN RedBook clearly states:

But wait a moment: isn't this tag creation procedure the same procedure we used to create a branch? Yes, in fact, it is.
In Subversion, there's no difference between a tag and a branch. Both are just ordinary directories that are created by copying.
Just as with branches, the only reason a copied directory is a “tag” is because humans have decided to treat it that way: as long as nobody ever commits to the directory, it forever remains a snapshot. If people start committing to it, it becomes a branch.