title: Proper SVN use of branches and trunk
body: <p>I have a question as to the proper use of the trunk and branches for my SVN projects. For my team's project we create 3 major releases each year and sometimes a minor release or two in between. At any point in time we may have active development on 2 or even 3 releases. We have been doing all development in branches with a structure like:</p>
  
  <p>/branches/project1/2009.01<br>
  /branches/project1/2009.06<br>
  /branches/project1/2009.09<br>
  /branches/project1/2009.10</p>
  
  <p>To date whenever I get ready to create a branch for the next release I have merged the changes from the current branch to the trunk and then I create the new branch from the trunk. I then manually keep the latest dev branches up to date with bug-fixes to the previous release branches by merges through the trunk. No development or commits are ever performed on the trunk (except for the commit for the merges).
  Now I am wondering what I even need the trunk for at all. What would be wrong with just creating the next release branch directly from the previous release branch and merge bug fix updates directly from one branch to the next as well. Could I just delete the project under the trunk?</p>
  
  <p>All the SVN best practices docs seem to indicate using the trunk for development but using separate branches for each release seems much easier to me since we can be working on 2 or 3 releases at one time. Is there any technical problem with my SVN usage? Suggestions?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>