Strategy to merge an Rev A.a modification into Rev A, B, C ... sources

[Jeff Kowalczyk]

I have revisions A, B, and C (and D before long), of a released tarball
package (CGI-perl source). I made some widely scattered (almost 30 files
touched), but compact (almost always contained within a single-line)
revisions to revision A (cleaning up the HTML output of the CGI-perl), and I
want to merge them in to my copy of the evolving trunk ASAP, to minimze
versionitis.

I set up my own CVS repository on my linux box. I want to track A, B, C and
future revisions to be able to diff the changes. This particular package's
source doesn't change wildly between point releases. What I want to do is
catch up a merge of my HTML changes to revision C as soon as possible, mark
that merged version as the head, and forever after, merge in the changes to
each revision against my modified copy.

How can I best use CVS to manage this task? I'm starting from scratch, so I
have no restrictions on how I set this up, I want to make it as amenable to
automated tools as possible. I'm hoping that since all the changes I've been
making were on single lines of HTML, that a patch tool can be used to either
merge in the changes of the new revisions or bring my revisions out to the
tarball releases going forward.

Any suggestions, in as specific a detail as possible, would be greatly
appreciated. Thanks.

(P.S. If this is generally unworkable to 'catch up' to Rev C, I'll just redo
my changes on that version before Rev D comes out, and start from there)