Subversion in-place import

I am in the process of investigating SubVersion - with a view to moving source control away from VSS.

Something I've been struggling with for a while, is how to add a tree to SubVersion, and make the added folder a working copy.

This is possibly something that wouldn't need to be done that often once using a complete subversion work flow for all development - but as the moment as I am adding projects individually from my web root, I'm wanting to do this quite a bit.

In the end, I imported the tree into SubVersion, deleted it from the file system, and then checked out the tree to the same location.

I thought I must be missing something completely obvious - but after speaking to other users, it seems that in place importing really is not possible :(

I did find this work around suggested on the official SubVersion FAQ: subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#in-place-import, which basically involves the following:

• Manually create empty folder in repositry
• Checkout the empty folder to the file system folder at the root of the tree you wish to add
• Add the subfolders / files etc. to SubVersion
• Commit the root folder

What does everyone else do???