both those drawings represent the same kind of tree. only that one tree has branches of branches, while the other only has one level of branches:
you could draw the tree like this:
--branch / ---0.5 ---0.6 ---7.0 ---7.2 ---7.4 ---7.6 / / / / / / --------------------------7.1--------7.3------7.5--------------7.7
hence, devel could be seen as the trunk, from which stable releases are branched off.
i don't care about the svn convention, it can be done any way you like. in git the whole issue becomes moot anyways. and the git hirtoey tree looks more like the second example and not like the svn one.
i'd just put all the branches (main and sub ones) into the same directory (whatever the name) and put the nonbranches somewhere else. and if you don't like the trunk convention then don't use it.
what confused me is that there are branches in two places, and non-branches mixed with branches in Pike.
however i can now also see the point of having main branches and sub branches in seperate directories.
in the end however the whole thing for me only matters as it affects how much work i need to do when importing the repo into git. as such i am just trying to understand what's going on here.
greetings, martin.