I have a bit of experience with SVN as a pure programmer/developer. Within my company, however, we use SVN as our configuration management tool. I thought using SVN for development at the same time was OK since we could use branches and the trunk for dev, and tags for releases. To me, the tags were the CM part, and the branches/trunk were the dev part.

Recently a person, who develops high level code (but outside of the "pure SW" group) mentioned that the existing philosophy (mixing SVN for dev and CM) was wrong... in his opinion. His reasoning is that he thinks the company's CM tool should always link to run-able SW (so branches would break this rule). He also mentioned that a CM tool shouldn't be a backup utility for daily or incremental commits. Finally, he doesn't like the idea of having to jump from revision 143 to 89 in order to get a working copy... and further that CM tools shouldn't allow reversion to a broken state. In general he wants to separate the CM and back-up/dev utilties that SVN offers.

Honestly, I am new and the person with this perspective is one of seniority, experience, and success, so I want to field this dilemma with the stackoverflow userbase to see if his approach has merit.

My question: Should SVN be purely used for development, and another tool for CM (or vice versa)? Why? If so, what tools would you suggest for this combo? Or do you think that integrating both CM and dev into SVN is the best approach? Why?

Thanks.