modules aliases

[Rosa Macias]

Can anyone confirm that the sentence in bold is really true?

mname -a aliases...

"This represents the simplest way of defining a module mname. The `-a' flags
the definition as a simple alias: cvs will treat any use of mname (as a
command argument) as if the list of names aliases had been specified
instead."

I doesn't work for me.
I have a module defined as:

mod1 dir1/a

I can do a cvs checkout mod1 but cannot use mod1 in any other command.
For instance,
cvs status mod1

says that nothing is known about mod1. If I instead do
cvs status dir1/a
it works. So, it doesn't seem to be true that nname and aliases are
interchangeable.

Why is that? Does anyone know?