Reference for git.git release process

[Raman Gupta <rocketraman@fastmail.fm>]

Hi I'm relatively new to git and I've been reading the git.git notes
about how git itself is maintained, as I'm interested in using a
similar workflow. I've read the MaintNotes document, the
howto/maintain-git.txt addendum, and Documentation/gitworkflows.txt.

I believe I understand reasonably well the concepts presented in those
three documents. However, those documents have a lot of detail about
the development process, but not much about the release process.


One question about the dev process:

1) I don't see any topic branches available in git.git. Are these
generally kept in a private repo and/or shared between individual
developer's public repositories?


Some questions about the release process:

1) After a release is made (master is tagged with vX.Y.Z), is the
maint branch deleted and recreated from the new release tag? e.g.

git branch -d maint
git branch maint master

2) MaintNotes states:

"After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next" will
be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving topics"

Does this mean:

git branch -d next
git checkout -b next master
git merge ai/topic1_to_cook_in_next
git merge ai/topic2_to_cook_in_next
...

Lastly, I note that the gitk --all representation of a repository
maintained in this way is very difficult to follow (at least for me)
because of all the merging. Are there some canned gitk invocations
that can be used to make the visualization of the integration and
topic branches more intuitive?

Thank you all very much for an excellent tool.

Cheers,
Raman