create subversion branch or tag without a working copy

Question

Is it possible to create a subversion branch or tag from a certain revision directly without having a working copy? I am using TortoiseSVN but I don't see this option in the repository browser! Isn't it good practice to use a certain revision for branching instead of a working copy?

If not I guess I'll just have to do a complete checkout into a temporary directory simply for creating a branch/tag.

(Details: The reason I ask is that I have an SVN project with a "trunk" directory that is logically subdivided into a few parts (directories) that in turn contain several subprojects/modules in subdirectories. Because the subprojects often change together I wish to branch/tag all of these at once. Unfortunately my IDE (Eclipse) cannot handle this hierarchical project structure. So I simply checkout each subproject directory directly as a project in my Eclipse workspace. This means I have several "sub working copies" and cannot use Eclipse to create such a branch/tag directly. What I would like to do is to create a branch/tag of the entire trunk which can be imported into a separate workspace for the specific branch or tag.)

Answer 1

Yes you can using SVN COPY operation. Another benefit of this is that all existing changes history will be kept. Doing copy through a local copy you can easily lose all previous change history.

And you can use Eclipse for this task as well. Do it through SVN Perspective > SVN Repositories view. Find your trunk, right click and select "copy" from the context menu. Then find correct destination and "paste". That would result in performing SVN Copy operation on the repository side.