Top Most Difference between trunk, tags and branches in SVN or Subversion source control system

SVN or Subversion is one of the popular source control system used in Java world for source code management. There are lot of source control system available e.g. Git, Perforce, CVS, Clearcase, VSS, but SVN has it’s own place among Java developer and open source communities. Knowledge of source control system is must for any professional programmer. New users of subversion often confused between three things trunk, tags and branches. Questions like, what is difference between a tag and a branch in subversion is frequently asked in various Java forums and chat rooms. In this article, we will see what is trunk, tags or branches in SVN and understand difference between trunk, tag and branch. In short, when you first upload your project to SVN it creates a trunk, It's analogous to trunk of tree. this trunk forms the main development line. When multiple developer work on different functionality of project they usually create branch from trunk and after successfully completing that functionality, they usually merge there changes to trunk. On the other hand tag is usually used to create read only snapshot of either trunk or branch, which has been released, for future use. You can think tag as stable snapshot of code at any point, and can be used to as backup or restore. Let's see difference between branch, trunk and tag more detail in next section.

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