"Branching in Subversion is primitive (and slow, since it's really just a copy). For me this is a major problem, because in addition to revisions, I also want to use branches for quick, version controlled staging areas for new features. That's a problem in Subversion, because branches are expensive, and merging is kind of wimpy." This is just not true. Branches and tags in Subversion are not copies, more like symlinks. I don't know how you did it, but they're usually pretty fast for me too (since all I'm adding is a symlink, that makes a lot of sense). Just use this command: svn cp http://svn.example.org/trunk http://svn.example.org/tags/xmpl-1.0.0 -m "Tagging version 1.0." Also, merging will improve a lot in version 1.5 and 1.6. That said, I'm not a Subversion fanboy. I think I'll probably moving to Mercurial after getting the last push from seeing Mozilla go there (previously, it was kind of a tie for me between bazaar-ng, which you haven't even mentioned here).