mergemaster clarification

[epilogue at attcanada.ca]

hello world,

yesterday, i made my first attempt at upgrading my system.  my machine seems
happy today, so my guess is that everthing worked just fine, but i'm new to this,
so i'm not really certain.  

since a misstep rebuilding the guts of your system has the potential to wreak
great havoc, i read up on the process and followed the steps as closely as
possible.  various sources (handbook, man page, absolute bsd, google) indicated
that mergemaster would compare files for differences.  it did, but it only presented
4 different files.  i had the impression that mergemaster would run through *all* the
files in /etc.  was i wrong to expect this?

my cvsup file includes this line -- *default release=cvs tag=RELENG_4_8.  if i
understand the cvsup instructions correctly, this means i should only get
code for security advisories and other seriously critical fixes.  the original install
of my system came from the 4.8 cdrom.  uname -a now reads
"FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE-p3".  i'm thinking that p3 = patch 3, so that looks good.  

does this mean that make world only rebuilds part of the code and not the whole
system?  could this be why mergemaster did not ask me about all the files in /etc?

hoping that someone with more experience can shed a little light on this for me.


thank you in advance,
epilogue