title: SVN Branching; what happens if we delete
body: <p>We use SVN for source code versioning, we are a small team of three developers and work using the AGILE methodology.</p>
  
  <p>Originally our code was put into trunk and various releases have been branched from it. Each release has been client specific but as the code has been improved we've quite often skipped merging back into the trunk and merged from the current release to another customer specific release, rarely merging back into the trunk. The trunk is totally out of date now and we are of a mind to create a new brand new trunk from the cumulative code changes made over the years in all of these branches.</p>
  
  <p>The question is this, what happens if we delete one of the releases (specifically, archive them out of SVN and then delete), will the chain fall apart or is SVN hard-linked. My assumption is that data won't actually be removed until there are no references pointing to the physical data. I'm not clear on how SVN works, is that the actual location of the data is irrelevant.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to export all of the revision history to an actual copy which can reside in the trunk or is this nonsensical and pointless.</p>