Ignoring deleted files in working directory

I've just installed Subversion and I'm new using it.
I want to use Subversion a little bit differently from
the usual source code management application and I'd
like a little advice.

I want to create a document archive in Subversion.
The archive will contain both current and historical
documents. I want the working directory to contain
only a subset of the files in the archive. I don't
want Subversion to complain about the files which are
missing from the working directory.

Subversion (as far as I can tell) only allows me to
checkout a full directory. Is there any way to check
out specific files from an archive?

Another alternative is to check out an entire directory
and then delete the unwanted files from the working
directory. Is there any way to tell Subversion to not
complain about missing files, for example, in a "svn
status" command? (I've thought about adding a command
line option to do just this.)

I've also thought about tagging old files with a
property like "svn:archive". Is there any way to
have Subversion only checkout certain files, such as
ones which do not have this property.

One idea which I considered and which does not work
is to import the historical documents into the archive
and then delete them. They are in the archive and
can be recovered, but this makes them invisible when
looking at the head of the revision tree, for example,
when using ViewVC.

Any ideas or suggestions?

-- 
Michael Eager	 eager@eagercon.com
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306  650-325-8077
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