How to create best historical repos from several versions of sources

I have a perl application that I'll be working with extensively. I have
over a dozen tarball archives of the released version sources.

Starting from a fresh repository, what is the best way to import and
represent these historical sources? I won't need to go back and work on
old versions, but I would like to have convenient diffs at each release
version, for comparison with the readme's list of new features.

I can imagine importing the earliest version, svn add all files, commit,
then clear the working directory (except for the svn info) untar the next
version, commit, and so on, until I'm caught up to the current source
tarball.

There are also fewer 'development' releases, which are versioned higher
than the 'stable' vesions (e.g. stable is at foo-4.2.6 and dev is at
foo-5.2.0, both increment for a while longer) . I will need to do some
work on the *newest* of the stable versions, and most of my work on the
*newest* of the development versions. Then, I will need to import new dev
and dev versions, and merge my local changes before proceeding.

Should I make a tag at each commit? In what style?

Make each release its own branch? I don't need to work with old releases,
only diff them.

Do I make a branch for 'stable' and 'development' to manage the parallel
releases?

If you have any advice and can spell out the steps for a relative newbie,
I'd be most appreciative. Thanks.

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Received on Fri Jun 18 23:22:10 2004