[etripe]

IMO, git flow came about when people didn't want to or couldn't abandon the idea of trunks in TFS.

I've heard its benefits explained as "more security for the business", while in practice it only leads to extra complications and accomplishes nothing a git tag couldn't.

[globular-toast]

Yeah, that matches my own analysis. I think it also comes from a time when people considered the source code to be an artifact and creating a source distribution was just checkout+zip. So you'd make a release commit with a version of the source code where the version is hard coded (the git flow page uses a "bump_version" script). Nowadays most projects can build an artifact (source or binary) from any version of the source code and derive their version number from git at build time.