Release 1.5 took much longer to finish than prior releases, but the headliner feature was gigantic: semi-automated tracking of branching and merging. This was a huge boon for users, and pushed Subversion far beyond the abilities of CVS and into the ranks of commercial competitors such as Perforce and ClearCase. Subversion 1.5 also introduced a bevy of other user-focused features, such as interactive resolution of file conflicts, sparse checkouts, client-side management of changelists, powerful new syntax for externals definitions, and SASL authentication support for the svnserve server.