Merge of branch to HEAD, failed to update head with any commited branch changes when files were locally modified.

[James R Kirk]

cvs-1.11.20-1 running on SUN sparc ultra-4,
SunOS 5.8

Checked out the current HEAD of a project
to a temporary merge sandbox. 
        cvs
co project
Followed with the merge of latest changes
on the branch( first merge from the branch to the HEAD
        cvs
update -j branchtag project
Merge did not update any files that
had been locally changed in a developers sandbox of that branch.

I did not expect the merge to pick up
uncommited local changes. 
        But
I did expect CVS to merge the number of earlier commited changes to the
same files on the branch.

I have looked the latest on-line CVS
documentation, and could not find any mention of this type of behavior.
 

My developers are asking how  the
cvs merge process even knew about the uncommited changes in the branch
sandbox?  And why cvs did not merge the earlier commited branch changes.
 

A cvs status on the merge sandbox for
one of the files in question gave the following:
===================================================================
File: qwreloadout.sc    Status:
Locally Modified

   Working revision:  
 1.13    Result of merge
   Repository revision: 1.13
   /CVSROOT/project/qw/src/qwreloadout/qwreloadout.sc,v
   Sticky Tag:    
     (none)
   Sticky Date:    
    (none)
   Sticky Options:  
   (none)

===================================================================
This file was not updated with the twelve
changes commited earlier to this file on the branch:

revision 1.13.4.12
date: 2005/08/01 22:08:35;  author: morris;  state: Exp;  lines:
+507 -29
PR#15733 Added initial support for the result log table for the
--changes option
----------------------------
revision 1.13.4.11
date: 2005/07/27 22:06:30;  author: morris;  state: Exp;  lines:
+38 -15
PR#15733 Some additional work on the --changes option
----------------------------
revision 1.13.4.10
date: 2005/07/27 21:35:00;  author: morris;  state: Exp;  lines:
+22 -17
PR#15733 Corrected code so that the same file was not opened twice
----------------------------
revision 1.13.4.9
date: 2005/07/27 21:16:18;  author: morris;  state: Exp;  lines:
+875 -74
PR#15733 Completed the full retrieval side
----------------------------
revision 1.13.4.8
 . . .