title: Is it possible to use the git-flow model with Subversion?
body: <p>We use Subversion and aside from a few individuals such as myself there is little to no experience with branching and merging in Subversion. My Subversion experience is limited to simple feature branches where merge and tree-conflicts, while not exactly rare, are not exceedingly difficult to resolve.</p>
  
  <p>Given that, I am helping to manage a project where our current commit to trunk method is simply unsustainable for our needs. I introduced feature branching and merging to my localized team and we had some success. However simple feature branching was still not able to answer all our questions such as:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>How do we develop code in parallel for this release and subsequent releases?</li>
  <li>What code is considered stable?</li>
  <li>What (in development) code is going into the next release?</li>
  <li>What (in development) code is going into a subsequent release?</li>
  <li>What version of code is our Test, Acceptance, or Production environments?</li>
  <li>How do we integrate concurrent development activities with a known stable release to reduce introducing bugs and incomplete work?</li>
  <li>How do we provide hot-fixes to released code?</li>
  <li>How do we know, from our source control, what development activity is currently ongoing?</li>
  <li>How do we experiment or R&amp;D without disrupting the current code base while leveraging?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>It seems that  <a href="http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/" rel="noreferrer">git-flow as defined here</a> would go a long way to answer a lot of these questions. I experimented with this method in Mercurial and it seems like that it is possible to implement this method there as well. Sadly, migrating to a DVCS is off the table at this point.</p>
  
  <p>However, my brief attempt to mimic this method in Subversion failed with many merge and tree conflicts. The merge options and edge cases are numerous and baffling.</p>
  
  <p>Can Subversion be used to implement <a href="http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/" rel="noreferrer">git-flow</a> and if so what is the pain level?</p>