I strongly suggest reading SVNBook thoroughly. You have to understand how Apache Subversion stores versioned data in the repository and saves the disk space.
The short answer to your question: you can't remove a branch using svn client tools. In fact, it's not required and I doubt it will help you to free the disk space: branching in Subversion does not duplicate any data, i.e. a branch shares history with the path it was branched from. (It is true unless you store very large binary files in the repository).
If you still want to get rid of some branches / tags / whatever and you know what you are doing, then you can use svn repository administration tools such as svnadmin
and svndumpfilter
to:
- Create complete repository dump using
svnadmin dump
, - Filter out those unwanted branches / tags / whatever from the dump using
svndumpfilter
tool, - Create new repository using
svnadmin create
, - Load the filtered dump to the new repository using
svnadmin load
.
I've already answered similar question recently, see the thread: How do I remove an SVN tag completely that contains spaces?.