If you’re using subversion and haven’t yet used svnmerge for merge management, I highly recommend it. It gracefully handles most of the chores associated with branches, from remembering which merges have happened and which were deliberately excluded to handling merges from multiple branches. Super-nifty. If you’re running a Debian distribution, svnmerge is available in the package subversion-tools (which also contains, among others, the super-useful svn2cl and commit-email scripts).
On a related note, I’ve finally posted my simple source code management guide.
