Merge Management

[Zachary M. Smith]

I am the build engineer for my company and one of the things that I
am currently working on is a Source Control Strategy which defines
things like when we branch, when and how we tag, and basically just
lays out the does and don't-s of the source control system (which is
currently CVS).

One of the aspects of this document that I am dealing with is how to
manage merges.  Most of the documentation that I have read (cvs and
others) suggests that you have the person best suited to resolve conflicts
do the merges.  This is commonly *not* the build engineer or the source
control system admin, but is more likely the developers who wrote the code.
That makes sense to me.  However, I am wondering if anybody has any thoughts
on this topic or some suggestions for what has worked for them in the past.
What I think i'd like to do is try to do the merges myself and delegate
conflict resolution responsibilities to developers but CVS does not appear to
have a very clean way of doing this.  Has anybody had any luck with doing 
things this way?  Any tips or tricks to make it a bit smoother?

-zach