Hi,

Command-line CVS clients support special update command option (-f), which
"forces a head revision match if tag/date not found". This provides a useful way
to work with partial branches on large source trees. It is possible to only
branch several files, then execute "cvs update -fdr MY_BRANCH" command, and the
whole tree will have MY_BRANCH as the sticky tag.

This kind of updates works faster than when updating from a regular whole-tree
branch and allows to avoid all kinds of awkward problems that are caused by
branching. For example, when a person works on their branch for a long period of
time, and someone else makes change to the trunk, with regular branch it would
be necessary to do an merge into the branch, then commit; with keyword
substitution, each file committed in this way will result in conflict, when the
branch is ready to be merged back into the trunk. On the other hand, with
partial branches, all you have to do is an update to the whole tree, which will
cause all changes made by the other people on trunk to become visible to you on
your branch.

This option was available in older NetBeans versions (the ones based on generic
CVS infrastructure), but the new module doesn't provide any way to do it. Doing
an "update -f" from the command line on source tree managed by the IDE also
doesn't work well: this causes NetBeans to think the HEAD files were deleted
from the repository, and GUI updates will remove them.

Please restore this useful feature.