Re: CVS repository conversion

if they were developed outside the main tree, doesn't that mean that they were not part of the trunk at that time but merged later?

They were not merged. They were initially included as a "module", which is the equivalent of e.g. svn:externals in subversion. So when checking out Pike, the module would get checked out as well, giving the impression that it was part of the main tree. Later, the ,v files were manually moved to the main tree, and the "module" directive removed. This made no practical difference except that the path to the repository for those directories changed slightly. There was never any merge operation involved.