The more I use subversion, the more I find ways to make it do more heavy lifting for me. I’m not talking about the kind of subversion that gets you a one way ticket to gitmo, but the open source version control system. I use it to manage my websites here, to keep them updated with the development copies I work on at home. We’ve also started using it more routinely at work on client sites, since it gives us an audit trail of changes.
One complain aginst SVN has been the lack of automated merge tracking. Its actually tedious and manual to have to merge changes from different copies, since unlike CVS, there’s no concept of a "branch" per se in SVN. Well, version 1.5 will introduce features to automate merge tracking.
Subversion’s upcoming 1.5 release is scheduled to deliver the core merge tracking feature with subsequent releases likely extending this. Fundamental to all merge tracking related functionality is the functionality to automatically record what change sets have been copied, or merged, where.