Can anybody diagram the concept of SVN Branching?

I have read Branching / Tagging twice now. I cannot seem to grasp this idea. I want to have a a good understanding of branching, to prevent errors to the main line.

Since I am a visual learner, can anybody diagram the concept of SVN Bran开发者_如何学Cching? Or is it possible in plain English to describes the concepts?

lets say i have 3 developers on a team and one repo "out_app" how would dev1 create a branch and merge back to the main line? how would this effect dev 2 and 3?

detail the steps, menue items clicked, settings entered... for the above questions.

See A Visual Guide to Version Control. Great article.

You can start reading the SVN readbook on Branching and merging

It is based on cheap copies:

Subversion's repository has a special design.
When you copy a directory, you don't need to worry about the repository growing huge—Subversion doesn't actually duplicate any data. Instead, it creates a new directory entry that points to an existing tree. If you're a Unix user, this is the same concept as a hard-link.
As further changes are made to files and directories beneath the copied directory, Subversion continues to employ this hard-link concept where it can. It only duplicates data when it is necessary to disambiguate different versions of objects.

(In my opinion) the best modelling and explanation of good revision control branching is in The Flow of Change by Laura Wingerd, a conference presentation made about Perforce. It describes the tofu scale, where changes flow from "soft" branches (untested, unstable) up to "hard" branches (released, well-tested) as revisions become more solid.

It provides a very understandable metaphor for managing revisions and branches; I cannot recommend highly enough that everyone reads through this presentation and absorbs its ideas.

tofu scale http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/136976/tofu%20scale.png