Why have a trunk dir, anyway?!

A very intuitive branching structure, often the first one that people
think of in my experience, is:

R1
---------------------------
           \
            \ R2
             \-------------------------
                        \
                         \ R3
                          \-------------------------
                                            \
                                  \ R4
                                   \-------------------------
                                              .
                                              .
                                              .

Now, with CVS you couldn't do this because you would become further and
further diverged from the trunk. And, with CVS, deleting branches wasn't
really an option.

However, with Subversion, the branching scheme above seems perfectly
do-able, at least as far as I can see. Especially, if you do away with
the concept of the trunk. Instead of having:

Proj/
        trunk/
        branches/
        tags/

You might have something like:

Proj/
        releases/
                R1/
                        main/
                        branches/
                        tags/
                R2/
                        main/
                        branches/
                        tags/

When a new release RN needs to start, just branch off of RN-1. As new
release goes into production, old releases can be retired (deleted).

So, my question is, why do we need the trunk concept anyway? Is it just
because we've been conditioned by CVS that you have to have a trunk. Or,
are there valid reasons? Also, can anyone see a problem with the second
of the two branching structures described above?

All comments appreciated. Thanks.

Chuck
                        

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Received on Thu Apr 26 20:45:42 2007