Also, loosing all cvs history (regardless of branches) is bad.
Well, then you dont really have much choice but to stick with horrible CVS, and the currently unorganized system. Take a step forward. CVS hsitroy will still be there, it just means having to look somewhere else. I'm not saying we wipe all the old stuff. Just move it. If history can go with it, great. Unfortunately, I don't think we can :(
Furthermore, the real solution to code documentation (even design) is inside
code, using doxygen. Doxygen can generate additional pages with project-wide
documentation (not per file) that are fully integrate with the rest of the
code. You can see example here :
http://lsn.unige.ch/osqoop/devdoc/ProcessingPluginsCookbook.html
See the other email about thoughts and plans (like the core system bradley is working on) as apposed to actual documentation.