How to avoid conflicts avalanche

[Sergiy]

Hi,

Our software has different modifications for different countries. Thus
in our cvs repository we have the main development trunk, and country
branches. When we cut a new major release on the trunk, we need to merge
from the trunk to all country branches. These merges result in a large
number of conflicts. It requires time and significant programming
efforts to resolve those conflicts.

One way to avoid this is to do interim merges regularly. The other way
could be to pursue developers to use some script which automatically
does the merge to country branches every time they commit to the trunk.
But they often forget to follow such procedures, and apparently CVS
doesn't have any way of enforcing this automatically.

The question is, if anybody experienced similar problems and has them
successfully resolved, what is the most effective solution to this
problem, and whether CVS provides any means to support that?

Thanks,            Serg