How Much Should You Import?

We never really explored the idea of restricting what we imported into Subversion. Cvs2svn offers lots of choices:

you can topskim your repository, meaning you get no history, no branches—a fresh start.
you can import absolutely everything, meaning you get every single branch ever made, every bungled thirdparty import—everything!
you can import anything in between these two extremes by selecting which tags and branches to import.

It's hard to argue against the "import everything" option: source control is all about tracking and managing changes, so why should any change ever be thrown away? And, as already mentioned, Subversion does provide a delete option (of course, anything you delete can be recovered), so you can tidy up at any point.

Since the initial import we've exercised svn delete rather a lot, and every time we need to upgrade a vendor branch we end up moving things. I still wonder if something closer to a topskim wouldn't have been better. We'll never know. And I secretly wish we'd accidentally-on-purpose turned off keyword expansion!