[eldavido]

I've never encountered this but agree, that can lead to a real hell of branching. Do you dead-end your releases and then backport certain things from your mainline to previous release branches?

Sounds like a headache but probably the best way in certain domains.

[pnathan]

Yeah, each release might be, e.g, firmware version x.y.z.patchlevel, and then you backport fixes and release on patchlevel.

Some customers demand the absolute minimum amount of change - their interface is essentially fixed, all they want is fixes, no more improvements.

Besides firmware, I think this also get applicable when doing larger whitelabel software, each major customer might want to have a particular version they are focused on using.