Help with bzr-svn

[Talden]

I've been playing with bzr-svn (on windows with bzr 1.11).  Generally
it's been a good experience but I am uncertain about how to get the
history our developers would expect.

NB: Numbers and paths are fabricated for the purpose of this email.
Based on a true story.

If I "bzr branch svn://server/repo/dev/projectX/newtrunk"  I get about
100 revisions. The trouble is that a little while ago 'newtrunk' was
copied from "svn://server/repo/dev/projectX/oldtrunk" where another
10000 revisions should be.

"oldtrunk" still exists and has a few patches applied and I'd like to
branch that too...

"branches" and "tags" are siblings of "newtrunk" and "oldtrunk" and
contain copies of either "newtrunk" or "oldtrunk".

Issues.
1. The history for "newtrunk" stops dead at a very recent 100 revisions.
2. "newtrunk" should be quite cheap in a shared repo as it is only 100
revisions diverged from "oldtrunk".

I tried svn-import and got a "root" conversion that isn't helpful at
all and "trunk" conversion gives me an error.

1. Is it possible for a branch to have history from another branch in
a bzr-svn conversion?
2. What other layout options are there.  What's involved in writing
one?  Would it be possible to make a discovery pass and provide a
means of editing a 'branches' file with (nick, path, parent)
information?

The conversions attempts took a very very long time even with a local
repo mirror (accessed via file://).
1. It's a v1.4 repository - Is bzr-svn any faster with a 1.5 repo?
2. Are the new changes to bzr-svn likely to help with my issues?
3. We've used svnmerge.py exclusively in merging.  If we convert this
to merge-tracking info in a 1.5 repo will merges be detected?

--
Talden