questions on development(7)

First of all I am posting to both -current and -hackers because
-hackers seems to be very low volume.

I just set up a master server development server using the procedure
in development(7) which was fairly clear but left a few questions
unanswered (and one odd behavior).  I have only the master server (no
clients).   Just for ref my dir tree looks like this:

/home/ncvs  ---> /FreeBSD/CVSROOT
/FreeBSD/7.x   (src)
/FreeBSD/current (src ports doc)
/usr/src ---> /FreeBSD/7.x
/usr/src2 ---> /FreeBSD/current
/usr/ports ---> /FreeBSD/current/ports
/usr/obj is on it's own partition

My questions:

1. If I am modifing code and such should I have a local branch?

2. If yes to #1 how do I setup keeping everything except my modified
code in sync (and if possible to retro activally apply patchs from the
local branch unto the main source tree [/usr/src2])

3. The documentation said very little about how to generate patchs
between my local code and the main branch
    a. Ideally I want to set it up where when I am done with a
modification it automatically creates a patch (I have never used CVS
for anything except through csup and cvsup so I am totally lost here)

4. Mergemaster behaves strange now:   everytime I run it does a
buildworld before doing the merge (even if I just did a
installworld)... also it seems to default this to /usr/src2 (which is
most of the time what I want)... is this normal? and if so how do I
turn it off and if I can't how do I set which source tree to use?

-- 
Aryeh M. Friedman
Developer, not business, friendly
http://www.flosoft-systems.com