> It sounds like people prefer to do these 'copies' because it's less
> work, (up front anyway) but if the cleanup work never gets done,
> doesn't it mean that it is no longer possible to check out a clean
> copy of <1.3 ?

People prefer to do the copies so that you can see all of the revision
information about a file in one place, independent of what location it
has been in over time.  It's not about saving work up front.

If you set all of the revisions to state "dead", everything should
work.  (Oh, and check in a new revision which isn't dead, of course.)
People looking at the log will be mostly able to tell what revisions
of the file correspond to an old location, although they can't
mechanically distinguish that from the file being deleted and
resurrected.  Of course, if a different file existed previously in the
new location, you're totally scrod in this scheme of things.

I personally don't like repository copies and don't allow them in
projects I control.  NetBSD made a different decision, and that's
fine.