I managed to figure out how to beat one awkward piece of workflow when starting new project: I always start hacking on a project, then I notice that I haven't been working on a svn checkout (it's the chicken or the egg problem). So I need to do a svn import, delete my copy of the project, checkout the svn version and start hacking at my project again. This workaround is agravated, though, when working with buildouts. I can't svn import the entire folder, because lots of generated folders and files will end up in subversion, which I don't want. Cleaning my original, running import and regenerate the buildout is a workflow killer.

The solution is simple, and goes like this: instead of importing the entire buildout folder, I can run

svn import . http://my/subversion/path/ --depth empty -m "initial import"

or I can just create a folder in my repository with svn mkdir

Next, checkout the empty folder from the repository into my buildout

svn co http://my/subversion/path/ .

Now I can cherry-pick whatever I want committed, with svn add. Problem solved!