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And not all projects produce a single output from their source code.

I've worked on multiple projects over the years that had mostly a common code base but had to build and release to support different hardware platforms. In some cases, these needed significant but permanent divergence between the code for one platform and another.

In this sort of environment, concepts like "master branch" and "continuous deployment" have no meaning, and neither does a principle like always being ready to deploy. Your whole approach to things like branches, merging, rebasing, cherry-picking, bug tracking, and what a version number means is probably different to, say, deploying a long-running web application with frequent updates and all users running the same code.