[menssen]

I have come to actually like the two permanent branches approach. I know that for any repository that follows this model that:

* "master" is the current stable release

* "develop" is the current "mostly stable" development version

The first time you clone a repository this is an extremely helpful convention to quickly get your head around the state of things.

If you're doing it right (and don't use --no-ff, which I agree is unreasonable), I can't think of a scenario where this causes extra merge commits. Merges to master should always be fast forward merges.

[jives]

We follow this model. I like thinking of "develop" as an integration branch, and "master" as an always-deployable gold master. And yep, develop -> master merges are always fast-forward merges.