How are tags made in Subversion?

Question

I know how to use tags in subversion. I create a tag every time I get to a release milestone.

What I don\'t quite understand is how they work.

Is a tag just a c

Answer 1

The TortoiseSVN help explains it quite nicely:

Subversion does not have special commands for branching or tagging, but uses so-called “cheap copies” instead. Cheap copies are similar to hard links in Unix, which means that instead of making a complete copy in the repository, an internal link is created, pointing to a specific tree/revision. As a result branches and tags are very quick to create, and take up almost no extra space in the repository. [...] If you modify a working copy created from a branch and commit, then all changes go to the new branch and not the trunk. Only the modifications are stored. The rest remains a cheap copy.