[globular-toast]

I would strongly encourage getting rid of the dev branch. It is redundant in almost all cases.

Instead think of the master branch as the integration branch. This is where everything gets merged ready for a new release. But the master branch itself is not a release. You can automatically deploy the master branch to a staging or "next" environment if you wish.

For releases, use tags. That's what they are for. If necessary you can make one or more "maint" branches where you backport important fixes from the master branch on to release branches to create patch level release versions.

[cjpearson]

Just to add on to this, I've found using dev/master or any other two-trunk setup also tends to encourage bad habits. One branch is seen as the 'production-ready' trunk while the other becomes 'broken-or-incomplete-code-ok' trunk.

When it comes to releases maintenance branches like you suggest are a lot more flexible and allow you to support old versions. Releasing v1.1 after v2 doesn't really work if all your releases have to be a merge to master.