i also wonder why they have been deleted from the repository itself instead of using cvs to remove them, which should have placed them into the attic.
For each new minor we copy the repository and clean things up. We don't care about being able to check out a compilable 7.6.66 from the 7.7 repository, but we do care about the file content history. So files are not ofter so much deleted as they are moved manually inside the repository. Fiddling with CVS commands has not been a priority, because CVS can't handle the history we wanted any way.