cvs update -frBRANCH tags unbranched files

[Stephen Baillie]

Hi All,

I've had a look through the FAQs, etc, and can't find anything about
this.  It seems like a bug, but please correct me if I've misunderstood:

We have branched a subset of our files for a particular version, so do a
lot of "cvs up -frBRANCH" commands to get changes.  However, this has
the side effect of giving all the files which happen to be trunk
versions (just picked up by -f) a tag of BRANCH, when no such tag
actually exists for that file.

This has a number of annoying effects:

First up, if I then do an update on a particular file without specifying
-fr, cvs does the update properly if it is one of the branched files,
but removes it if it's a trunk version.

Secondly, if I make a change to one of these files and commit it, this
works fine if it's on the branch, but it it's on the trunk I get
"up-to-date check failed".  I then have to do an update -A on the file
just so I can check it in.

There could be an argument that cvs is preventing me from making changes
to the trunk when I'm technically working on a branch, but isn't the
whole point of the -f flag to override this?

Anyway, I think that the -f flag should prevent cvs from tagging files
that only exist on the trunk with a non-existant branch tag.

Thanks,

Stephen.