a new method to manage the tags

[toliuch@…]

I guess we need not copy anything to the 'tags' directory to record the special release. With trac, adding another table to write down it is a way to manage the releases. The new table would has two main fields: tag(or the name of the release) and its corresponding changeset/commit number. The tag field should be the primary key of the table. Also, some other fields would give us much help: comment to the release, path to check out the sources, the user name who created the release, data/time, etc.

[Matthew Good]

This is basically a duplicate of #959.

However, if Trac does add some features for release managment, it will be built around the Subversion tags, not as a way to replace them. For one thing it's not necessary for Trac to duplicate this functionality, and the tags are still important when interacting with the Subversion repository directly.

[toliuch@…]

I do not think the svn system has any tag support. However, the commit ID is a very wonderful design to replace tag. To identify a release, just a tag(a simple string) is not enough. So, as a integrated SCM system, the ticket/issue tracking system should depend on a release management module.

[Matthew Good]

Well, SVN doesn't support tags in a special manner like CVS does. In SVN they just appear as a directory under "/tags". However, there's more to a tag than just a revision number. You need to know the source of the tag, which could have been the trunk, or a branch, and in some cases a tag may not correspond directly to any single revision in your repository. Also, tags are important for someone looking directly at your SVN repository, so that they don't have to remember a specific revision number.

See ​http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/ch04s06.html for more information on SVN's use of tags.