Moreover, there is a release branch that holds the former and current releases. The idea of a release branch is that after releasing the HEAD is opened again for unstable development activities. A release branch however should always be stable and is only used to do important bug fixing on the release.

Release branches must be named using the following scheme:

Example: OLAT-6_0_x-BRANCH, OLAT-6_1_x-BRANCH...

We do not make release branches for every single release. We maintain a release branch for each feature release. (6.0, 6.1 etc). The bugfix releases (6.0.1, 6.0.2 etc) are tags on those release branches.

As a developer one must take care of merging bugfixes back to the HEAD development. Each developer is responsible to do this. Best is to do it immediately after committing a fix to the release branch.