Families of products and branches

I've been using Polytron's PVCS (1990) and RCS for a long time. In our firm, we
develop families of products. Each family may consist from one to dozens of
different products. Many of the products of a family share a lot of code. Almost
every product in a family is alive, evolving at its own pace.

We have been tracking this evolution with branches in the files: some files of a
family only have a trunk, others have a trunk and many branches (some branches
are shared by different products, others are unique to a product). When a release
of a product is finished, its development label is changed to a frozen one. When a
new release of a product is to be developed, or even when a new product is to be
developed, a new development label is created, pointing to a given frozen label,
and growing upwards or branching again as necessary. Sometimes we merge
branches, but not very often.

What I'm trying to make clear is that we have a forest full of trees, some of them
thin and tall as a cypress, some of them wide and full of branches as a bush. But,
in any case, almost every branch is alive.

Now, after reading svn's manual and playing with it, I have the impression that
svn-people don't use branches for this model of development, but only for two
other reasons:

a) Short-term development of risky or tentative features or modifications (with the
intention to merge the branch into the trunk or discard it).

b) To separate a mature line of development (perhaps a deployed release, with
some patches in perspective, but only barely alive) from the active one.

Is not well suited svn's branch mechanism to our case? Does anybody have
some experience to share that could make me more confident in svn's
capabilities to accomplish this task?

-- 
Saludos,
  Ignacio González Torquemada
  ELIOP, S.A.                Departamento de Productos
  http://www.eliop.es       mailto:igtorque_at_eliop.es
  Tel. +34 91 383 57 47   Fax. +34 91 302 92 49
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