CVS branches and versioning

[Al Stone <ahs3 at fc dot hp dot com>]

I am very confused.  Let me embarass myself for a moment...

If I check out a copy of binutils from CVS with:

  $ export CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@sources.redhat.com:/cvs/src
  $ cvs login
  $ cvs -z9 co binutils

I get binutils 2.15.90 (well, not entirely -- the make fails
on ia64 Linux, but that's another problem); bfd/configure 
contains 2.15.90 for the VERSION value and all the executables
built report it as they should, e.g.:

   $ ar --version
   GNU ar 2.15.90 20040305
   ...

So far, so good.  This makes some sense -- mainline for
the tree should be the upcoming version.

Here's the problem: if I check out with the 2.15 branch
tag like so:

   $ cvs -z9 co -rbinutils-2_15-branch binutils

And then build this source version, I get 2.14.90, _not_
2.15 (bfd/configure does say 2.14.90).  For example:

   $ ar --version
   GNU ar 2.14.90 20040218
   ...

I just repeated this about 10 minutes ago, just to make
sure I wasn't doing something silly.

Isn't this backwards?  Or am I just misunderstanding
something horribly?  I'm hoping it's the latter...

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Ciao,
al
----------------------------
Al Stone
Linux & Open Source Lab
Hewlett-Packard Company
E-mail: ahs3@fc.hp.com
----------------------------