vc-merge issues

[Dave Love]

The prompt from M-x vc-merge is:

Branch or version to merge from (default: news on current branch): 

`news' there doesn't make sense to me.  It is explained in the
command's doc, but i think it needs a better word, perhaps `updates'.

More importantly, merging from a CVS branch (à la `cvs up -j<branch>')
doesn't work the way I think you'd normally want to use it.  I'd
expect to provide a symbolic tag for the branch, but that's never
recognized as a branch because `vc-branch-p' only deals in revision
numbers.  Could symbolic tags be looked up in log output to find out
whether they're branches or not?  Alternatively, perhaps a prefix arg
could be used to specify merging from a branch if the tag is symbolic.