private branches: to delete or not to delete

After reading the book (of course) and mails from this list
i have one little question (well, maybe it is three little questions)
for the svn gurus out there. thanx in advance.

let me explain the procedure we use for development.

i have a single project per repository... ( svn://server/project )

the choosen layout is very close to the sugested one in the book::
  project/trunk
  project/releases (could be named tags)
  project/branches
  project/branches/test

the folders names tells it all:
- trunk is for the trunk code (as expected)
- releases is for the releases. It is just has svn copies of some trunk
revision.
- branches is for branches (of course)

the last folder in the layout is
 - branches/test

That is where each developer does his thing. We'll you know what i mean:
It is meant to be for private branches, so he (the coder) may code whatever
and the trunk is isolated from his excelent code (and bugs) until
testing and merging.

And at a given point it may have something like this.
- branches / test / john-doing-this
- branches / test / meg-doing-that
- branches / test / fred-refactoring-that-other-thing
- ....

And so on.

This are private development branches, and are meant to be there
for some very specific deveelopment task . These private branches
are not expected to compile when checked-out;
but these are expected to compile before merging into the trunk.
Then we do the merging and cest boila!: one or two conflicts here,
and about the same number of resolved commands, and it does compile again.
now he may commit into the trunk.

Well, if as i said before, these private-development-branches are
for a very specific task, and they have a very sort active live
(maybe ono or two days of coding, never (hopefully) up to a week)

After some time, the number of branches in branches/test is quite long,
and the code has been merged into the trunk.

So here comes The Question:
1.- Could i delete the private-development-branches from the repository?
2.- Will i lose the logs / history ?

If i understand how subversion works, even if i delete one of these
branches...

> svn delete
svn://sever/project/branches/test/jeff-whatever-private-branch -m
"delete private branch namethatbranch"

...the whole repository will be versioned, (lets say we get revision 102)
and i can get back the complete branch (logs, history and so on
included) with

> svn checkout -r 102 svn://server/project/branches/test/

Including the deleted private-dev-branch

And Last Question
3.- even if this is true, is this (to delete priv-dev-branches) a good
practice?

Thank you.

--
Edgar Varese: the present day composer refuses to die.
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