Why tags as branches?

Subversion designers,

I've been reading a LOT of material on subversion lately, and I've got to ask:

     Why did you implement tags as branches?

Tags are conceptually just bookmarks in a version control system. It would have been trivial to implement tags as a hash table of revision number aliases, since that's what they really are. Then there would be no chance of inadvertently converting a branch to a tag.

The svn client might have had a new call:

     svn tag https://some.domain/svn/project1[@rnn] TAG_NAME

Or even better:

     svn propset https://some.domain/svn/project1 svn:tags TAG_NAME:rnn

To use a tag, you might then just do this:

     svn update -rTAG_NAME

This syntax is similar to saying svn update -rPREV.

Aren't PREV, BASE, COMMITTED, and HEAD just pseudo-tags, anyway?

John

John Calcote
Sr. Software Engineer
jcalcote@novell.com
801.861.7517

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