Despite the mass of resources on CVS usage available, little of them mention the issue of naming branches and tags which is very important if you strategy suggests there will be a lot of them in the repository.

Here is what we came up with.

Full branch name: Br_yy-mm_BranchName
Root (base) tag for branch: Root_Br_yy-mm_BranchName (as prompted by Eclipse)
Latest trunk-to-branch merge point in branch: Br_yy-mm_BranchName_Merged
Latest branch-to-trunk merge point in trunk: Merged_yy-mm_BranchName
Sub-branches: Br_yy-mm_BranchName_SubBranchName
Latest stable version: HEAD_STABLE or Br_yy-mm_BranchName_STABLE (shared movable tag, can be assigned only by module owner)
Release of any kind: Delivery_yy-mm_Purpose-Or-Version (example: Delivery_05-01_Milton-Demo)

Notes:
1. yy stands for year’s, mm – for month’s 2 last digits, the month of the branch creation; these numbers stay constant for all interconnected artifacts despite of the time of their creation, i.e. Merged for branch contains the date of branch creation and not the date of merge operation
2. Try using TitleCase or dashes inside long proper names instead of underscore. Underscore _ is used to separate the logical segments of a name.

Read more about CVS management >>