The difference between a tag and a branch in SVN

svntortoisesvn

I'm working with SVN Branches and TRUNK for years, but never with TAGs

Can someone advice what is main difference between those?
What is main purpose of Tagging?

Best Answer

This is from http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.branchmerge.tags.html

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.

Technically, it's the same as a branch but conceptually we take it as a snapshot. In my svn repositories, I know that branches will include large features that may or may not have been merged into the trunk, but I use tags to mark release versions only.

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