Issue creating branch tag off of numeric revision

[Kevin . Kane]

Hi all,

I'm sure this issue has been raised before, but since I have not been able
to find any specific info on this I'm hoping someone will be able to
provide an explanation anyway.

The problem is straightforward: using rtag to create a branch with a
symbolic tag does not actually create a branch if you specify only the
major numeric revision with the -r option; it appears that CVS considers
that a special branch, and does not create a branch-off-branch.

For example, let's say I have the following revisions for file fred.cc:

1.1
2.1
2.2
3.1

Now, what I would like to do is make a branch at the latest revision at
major version number 2 as follows:

cvs rtag -b -r2 mytag fred.cc

Running "cvs update -r mytag fred.cc" works fine, and "cvs status -v
fred.cc" shows that the sticky tag is "mytag (branch: 2)". However, you
cannot commit any changes to this file because the branch is actually just
major revision 2, which you cannot commit to because the current major
revision number is 3. So, rtag effectively did not create a branch at all.

This example would be easy to fix by specifing the full revision number
(e.g., -r2.2), but this is obviously not feasible for large numbers of
files and directories. There are other ways around this, such as creating a
temporary symbolic tag at -r2 and then creating the branch tag off of the
symbolic tag; a nuisance but a valid workaround as long as there no
branches created already. If there are, CVS does create a
branch-off-branch, and you end up with more branches than you wanted.

>From the way that other commands such as update work, and from reading the
documentation, I would have expected rtag to behave the same way given just
the major revision number as other commands (i.e., work off of the most
recent delta on that branch). It does if there is already a branch, but not
if the only "branch" is the major revision number.

Basically I'm wondering whether this is a bug, feature, omission, etc. Any
background would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Kevin