I'm going to try to keep this simple. Wish me luck. Subversion requires you to do a sync merge from your trunk to a branch, before you can do a reintegrate merge from the branch back to the trunk. But the sync merge seems incompatible with a branching pattern where the trunk contains ongoing development and branches contain releases. It does not make sense to put changes from the trunk that were not in the release into the release branch. There may be workarounds to this, but they are beside the point. I've read the svnbook and many Subversion forums, and I may be missing something, but nothing I've read seems to address this fundamental contradiction.
So is it true that Subversion does not support my concept of a "common-sense" branching pattern (without workarounds), or is there some other branching pattern that fits Subversion and makes sense for software development? I'm using TortoiseSVN 1.8.7/Subversion 1.8.9.
