[georgieporgie]

Historically with SVN, branching was skittish.

Really? How? I've always found Subversion branching to be painless, reliable, fast enough, and merges often go flawlessly, and it's really not been that hard to resolve merge conflicts.

[cheald]

Branching with SVN requires creating a separate copy of the entire repository, effectively. It rapidly becomes unwieldy with larger projects.