cvs branching... the usual questions?

[Alexander von Below]

Sorry if these questions have been asked over and over and over, but my 
brain hurts from reading the cederquist and various tutorials, and I 
still don't get it...

I have a version of my source with, say, a tag "VERSION1BETA". Now I 
checked it out, modified a few files, but wanted to branch these off, 
as version one is still not finished. So I issued `cvs tag -b 
VERSION2DEV` and committed the files (new files were added)

First problem I ran into is that I wanted to continue to work on the 
"VERSION1BETA" branch, but when I checked it out using -r, it would not 
let me commit. So I did an cvs update -j VERSION1BETA (in a dir that 
had exactly this tag checked out), changed a file (for testing), and 
commited.

What I have now is:

VERSION1BETA and VERSION2DEV are identical. The current version (plain 
checkout) contains all changes.This is OK at this point, and I think I 
need to read up on automatic merging

What I want:

I would like the main trunk not to be the VERSION2DEV branch, but 
originating from VERSION1BETA directly. Also, I would like them to be 
distinct until I decide to merge them again. Am I still making sense?

Any help would be really appreciated, or a link to 
yet-another-branching-tutorial.

Thanks a lot

Alex