'svn copy' is how we make branches. If you inspect that commit later - specifically the diff for it - you see that every line of every file was added. In some cases, during that copy you might have changed one or two things, but you can't pick them out the diff as every line is marked as an add. Could we have a command-line switch for diff that allowed the hiding of unchanged lines from the ancestor? svn diff --smarterBranchHistory -r123:124 Off by default so that nothing breaks. Seems to me to fit the promise of "lightweight branches" a little better. Of interest, Crucible does extra work to note that all-those-added-lines were not actually added. In those cases it marks the content for the file in that change-list as "No Change" regardless of what 'svn diff' fed it.