Branches and merging

[Roddie Grant]

I'm trying to get the hang of branches and merging, but I'm a little
confused, I think over branchnames and tags.

This is for website development. The trunk is where development work is
done; the live site is a branch so that I can try things out on the trunk,
secure in the knowledge that the live site is unaffected. From time to time
I need to merge trunk-to-branch or branch-to-trunk, and I don't seem to be
getting it right; changes are not appearing at "the other end".

I have been creating branches with
# cvs tag dev_0-1-2_branch-root (in the dev sandbox)
# cvs rtag -r dev_0-1-2_branch-root -b www_1-0-1_branch www.example.com

Subsequently I've been tagging the branch from time to time thus,
incrementing n: "www_1-0-n_branch". But I'm now thinking that the
"www_1-0-1_branch" of the rtag command is the *branchname*, not a tag.

Therefore the command should be more like
# cvs rtag -r dev_0-1-2_branch-root -b branch_for_live_site www.example.com
I can then subsequently tag the branch as "www_1-0-n_branch".

So when I want to transfer changes made on the branch to the trunk I can use
(from within a trunk sandbox)
cvs update -j www_1-0-n_branch -j branch_for_live_site
where n is the number associated with the previous merge.

Is that correct, or am I still confused?

TIA

Roddie Grant