Learned more about CVS today. CVS is weird--I knew that already, but now I understand it a little better. I ran a cvs remove on lnxs/usr.bin/man the other day, because I tried an import of a newer version and there were conflicts, and I'd hoped to not have to deal with conflicts. (I might have made some mistakes the first time I imported, like choosing by start tags.) However, the next time I tried to import, everything went directly into the Attic. Yuck.
So I read up a bit on it, and CVS sets the otherwise user-set "State:" field to "dead". I found out that state can be changed with the cvs admin -s <state> command. I looked up the "admin" in the Cederqvist manual, however, and it was not recommended that you diddle with the dead state, but that you use cvs remove and cvs add instead.
Well, after playing around with it, I finally copied the innards of the tarball I was trying to import into place, and with find I re-added everything. Now, everything is happy.
Lessons learned: Don't use cvs remove to make importing easier. To get files back from the dead, re-add them. Seems to be the only way. Don't try to use <code> tags in Advogato diary entries--use <tt> instead.