The most important part of working with Subversion branches is to merge from trunk often. Daily at a minimum, more if possible. The converse is also true - merge to trunk often - once features can go to trunk, merge them.

The more branches diverge from each other, the more merging becomes hell.

The longer you take between merges, the more files you will have to merge, the more chances of conflicts and the more chances that people will not recall the details of changes (meaning that making the right call on a conflict can become very difficult).

You will also need to decide on a branching strategy - this is not something that you will need to tailor to your team and workflow and will probably need to tweak as you go along. Interesting presentation here (pdf).

Ensuring successful merges in Subversion
Today I saw a post on Facebook that had this pun:


  Clicked links turn purple because blue + "read" equals purple


Is there any specific reason why a link is blue and when it is clicked/read, it turns to purple?

Do these colors have any meaning?
