Confused about using Import

[Terry Spafford]

Sorry if this gets out twice, got an error when I tried to send this
before so I suspect I had something misconfigured at first.

I've been experimenting with CVS import and I noticed some wierd
behaviour. I'm not sure if it is due to me not knowing how to use it
properly, or trying to do something that it isn't supposed ot be doing or
what.

Anyways, I did the following.

I had a directory mk containing the files Makefile, suffix.mk and
prefix.mk I wanted to import as a new CVS repository.

I did the following commands from within that mk directory:

cvs import -m "New CVS tree" mk new_branch start

and the tree was imported fine. (Got no problem with all this).

What I have noticed though is that when I do this, I end up with a branch
that I don't use (new_branch). Since it does show up on cvs status -v, I
was experimenting to see if there was some way I could use this branch and
I noticed the following behaviour. (Start also appears on the cvs status
list but that is just a regular tag and not a branch so it is annoying but
not as confusing)

If I checkout that new code without any flags ( cvs co mk ) and make a
change and commit it, the change is not seen on the new_branch branch.
This is fine; it is what I expected would happen.

If I now checkout that code with the new_branch tag (cvs co -r new_branch
mk ) and make a change to a different file, and commit it, that change
goes in on the branch (good) but it also goes in on the trunk as well (not
so good/confusing). However if I make a change to the file I previously
changed on the trunk, the change only goes in on the branch; it doesn't
overwrite the one of the trunk. (As expected)

My confusion comes from the middle case. Why is it that when I make a
change to a file on that particular branch that has not been changed on
the trunk, the trunk will now see those changes?

Is there any easy way to not have this happen? Or should I simply get used
to having an unused branch hanging around in all my projects (and have the
branch labeled as unused so people don't try to check it out)

Also, with respect to version numbers, if I were to manually increase the
version of the trunk from 1.# to 2.0, would all the branches that were off
of it (as 1.1.1.2.# etc....) stay the same? What if I did it the other way
(increased a branch's version to 2.1.1.2.0 while leaving the trunk as 1.#)
?

Thanks for your help.