Our branching model

stable holds released code and is tagged with where it is released, so Drupal-7.x-1.11 would mean that it is part of the Drupal 7.x-1.11 module.

master holds all the newest runnable code.

release holds code that is about to be released - typically used actively when regression testing prior to release

In addition there are feature branches that are branched out of master and where master should be frequently merged in. Feature branches are deleted when merged back to master with --no-ff

And there are hotfix branches normally branched out of stable and merged in to both stable, release and master when doing hotfixing.