Bill de hSra has a good post on Subversion branching practices.

So here's a Python-specific quandary: how should tagging happen exactly?

Into the buildutils svtag command I've built this process:

• Copy from Project/trunk (current directory) to Project/tags/version
• Check out the new version into ../Project-version
• Edit setup.py to change the version (if necessary), and setup.cfg to remove tag_svn_repository and tag_build = dev
• Edit setup.py in the trunk to have the next version
• Commit all changes

It ends up being three commits, which is a little annoying. And, technically, I'm editing a tag, even if it is a very minor edit.

Another issue -- do people have any particular tricks for keeping their checkouts up to date? I just have a shell script that does an svn up for each directory, and another for doing svn stat -u on all my "active" projects. But I don't use the scripts as regularly as I should, nor do I keep the list of active projects up to date. And it's all kind of vague anyway -- I run lots of things from svn checkouts even if I am not necessarily tracking every development on the project.

I'm also curious about tools built on Subversion for handling branches better. One of the commenters points to Subclipse, which uses a property to track tags. But it doesn't seem to describe what exactly it is doing and what that tag means. svk also uses a special property for tracking merges, which is probably better documented. I'm curious how half-heartedly I can use svk (this page isn't actually that helpful) -- can I just use it as a better frontend to Subversion? Will it work okay if other developers aren't using svk?

Indexing of repositories and general tracking also remains relevent, both locally (what do I track?) and globally (what versions of things exist out there?)

Incidentally, I would be very interested to hear how exactly people are using svn (or svk) on their machines. Like, the play-by-play of every non-obvious command they use, script they have, or whatever.