Quoting "Joseph S. Myers" <jos...@codesourcery.com>:
Viewing deleted files and their history (and for SVN deleted branches are just a special case of deleted files) is something SVN is bad at since you do need to work out the last revision the file was present first. I hope that any version control system we change to will make it easy again to see the history of a deleted file (including one in a deleted directory, or on a deleted branch) if you know its name but not exactly when it was deleted.
While we are on the subject of SVNs shortcomings, I'd like to point out another one: finding deleted lines. When I had shell account access to the RCS / CVS server, I could do a straightforward regexp search on the RCS *,v file to search the entire history of a file, and look at the vincinity of the match to understand context and find the last revision the match appeared in. Although this was not an official interface of CVS / RCS, it was very useful at times.
