Correct way to undo commit of a tag in SVN?

Question

My most recent commit was the creation of a tag. I want to delete that tag. Should I reverse merge the commit or simply delete the tag?

If I do a reverse merge I see a tree conflict:

C:>svn merge -c -69  

--- Reverse-merging r69 into '.': 

 C tagsTAG_ 

--- Recording mergeinfo for reverse merge of r69 into '.': 

U . 

Tree conflict on 'tagsTAG_ 

 > local dir edit, incoming dir delete upon merge 

Select: (r) mark resolved, (p) postpone, (q) quit resolution, (h) help: 

What is the best thing to do here?

Answer 1

In subversion the usual convention is that tags are never changed after the copy that creates them. That is, they become human-friendly names for a single revision. If you are following that convention, then you should delete the tag if it was not what you intended so you can reuse that tag name.

However, changes tend to be ongoing so you may want to name your tags with some version numbering scheme - in which case you might create a newer tag later and ignore earlier versions. Copies are cheap in subversion and it doesn't hurt to have extra tags as long as the names are not confusing.