Rolling master branch

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

Hi,

Our current release model requires us to freeze the master branch for
releases, until the release is cut and branched out.  This results in
a halt in development for usually about a month or so and any new
patches that don't qualify for the current release have to wait till
whenever the release happens.

Instead, we could just create a release branch to indicate the freeze,
which means that the release branch can only have pre-decided
exceptions on top of it and nothing else, until we're ready to
actually cut the release, the point which is tagged as the release.
This would work more or less the same as the current workflow, except
that it frees up master for continuous development and the release
manager and committers may have to push to two branches instead of one
until the release is tagged.

Thoughts?

Siddhesh