What's the best way to work with branches.

[Kevin Drapel]

Hello,

I work on a project with another "admin". We have a set of developers 
but we don't fully trust their work and we want to "moderate" their 
code. From the main trunk, I created a branch called "unstable", we want 
to merge the changes made by developers into this branch (which will be 
further merged back into the main trunk). I also created a branch per 
developer, each developer works on his own branch and he's supposed to 
update his branch from the "unstable" branch (my question is about this 
problem).

A developer can only commit/apply modifications to his branch but he has 
read access to the whole module. Admins have of course permissions on 
all branches.

After reading the CVS manual, especially the chapter about branches 
("Merging from a branch several times"), I guess that we will have a lot 
of problems to update all these branches. In the manual, they recommend 
to tag the "source" branch after each merge but this seems impossible in 
my case because the developer can't tag a branch he doesn't own. On the 
other side, would it be possible to update the "destination" file on the 
"destination" branch using the latest version available on the "source" 
branch ? Something like :

cvs update -jR1fix:"how to get the latest version" -j R1fix m.c

What would be the good/best way to work with all these branches ? I'm a 
bit confused with all these branching issues...