cvs up -D on trunk fails bizzarely

[bame]

Ok maybe I'm missing something about the CVS architecture, but it seems
to me that 'cvs up -D<date> -rHEAD' (or -r1. I don't know what's right
these days) should work.  I tried the same thing on another branch and
it worked as expected.  Here's a test case which removes the file when
the date-based trunk update is done, but when the branch is omitted it works:

    $ date > e
    $ cvs add e
    cvs add: scheduling file `e' for addition
    cvs add: use 'cvs commit' to add this file permanently
    $ cvs commit -mno-message e
    RCS file: /tmp/cvs/b/e,v
    done
    Checking in e;
    /tmp/cvs/b/e,v  <--  e
    initial revision: 1.1
    done
    $ cvs up -rHEAD -Dnow e
    cvs update: e is no longer in the repository
    $ cvs up -Dnow e
    U e
    $ 
    $ cvs -v

    Concurrent Versions System (CVS) 1.11 (client/server)

At first I thought was some crazy interaction with a script we use
here called 'safe-cvsimport' which attempts to update a vendor branch
without spilling anything over into the trunk unlike normal 'cvs import'.
It's a nasty ugly script and among other things does 'cvs admin -b' to
turn off automatic promotion of stuff from the branch to the trunk, but
the test case above eliminates it as a variable.

        -Paul Bame <bame@debian.org>