This document discusses basics of branching, tagging and packaging for product release management with SVN. It covers why SVN is used, environmental considerations, branching strategies including the unstable trunk strategy, tagging, versioning, packaging, and merging in Subversion. Branching allows independent lines of development while maintaining a shared history. Tagging creates snapshots for versions. Packaging gathers artifacts like source code and database scripts into repeatable releases. Merging integrates changes between branches.