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## Magic branch numbers

Externally, branch numbers consist of an odd number of dot-separated decimal integers. See section Revision numbers. That is not the whole truth, however. For efficiency reasons CVS sometimes inserts an extra 0 in the second rightmost position (1.2.3 becomes 1.2.0.3, 8.9.10.11.12 becomes 8.9.10.11.0.12 and so on).

CVS does a pretty good job at hiding these so called magic branches, but in a few places the hiding is incomplete:

- The magic branch number appears in the output from `cvs log`.
- You cannot specify a symbolic branch name to `cvs admin`.

You can use the `admin` command to reassign a symbolic name to a branch the way RCS expects it to be. If `R4patches` is assigned to the branch 1.4.2 (magic branch number 1.4.0.2) in file ``numbers.c'` you can do this:

    $ cvs admin -NR4patches:1.4.2 numbers.c

It only works if at least one revision is already committed on the branch. Be very careful so that you do not assign the tag to the wrong number. (There is no way to see how the tag was assigned yesterday).

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