title: What's the right way to manage a release with SVN?
body: <p>My last employer had developed an elaborate system which sat on top of SVN to deal with ongoing development: (<b>change management</b>) look at bugs/issues and associate them with commits when making the commit by tagging the bug id number and (<b>release management</b>) tag items in SVN as part of a specific release based on the bug/issue tracking system.  This second part had a workflow associated with it to get sign-off from users/management.  Then, when it came time to do the release (usually every Thursday evening), they could run a command to checkout all the tagged code and deploy it.  </p>
  
  <p>My new firm is much smaller and I'm interested in finding a low-cost/low-maintenance equivalent, even if it just means dealing directly with SVN.  In particular, I regularly find commits late-in-the-game breaking our build, and it becomes very difficult to untangle what we can include.  (So far as managing SVN is concerned, I tend to prefer the idea of tags over branches because it require less forethought, but I'm happy to be convinced otherwise.)</p>
  
  <p>What do people use to tag commits for a release and to do a subsequent deployment?  Are there any good open-source solutions to manage a release cycle that allows you to browse SVN from a web browser and tag issues/commits for a release?  The best thing that I have seen so far is <a href="http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Jira</a>, but that looks like a very big tool (is it difficult to configure/maintain?).  The Apache Foundation makes good use of Jira for this purpose (see, for instance, <a href="https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAHOUT?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project:roadmap-panel" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the Mahout roadmap</a>). </p>
  
  <p>Going even a step beyond this would be to have this same system also include continuous integration so that our unit tests could be run with each commit and each bug/issue would then also have this information associated.</p>
  
  <p>Note: There are some slightly related questions on stackoverflow, but I don't see anything covering this aspect of the deployment cycle and release management (see <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/569353/release-management-in-svn">release-management-in-svn</a>, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/493403/how-do-you-manage-your-project-life-cycle">manage-your-project-life-cycle</a>, and <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/184652/what-is-the-best-way-to-handle-change-management">best-way-to-handle-change-management</a>).</p>