Despite the value of release branches, most of the best teams don't use this pattern for single-production products, because they don't need to. If the mainline is kept sufficiently healthy, then any commit to mainline can be released directly. In that case releases should be tagged with a publicly visible version and build number.

Release branches are a valuable tool when a team isn't able to keep their mainline in a healthy state.

Teams that only have one version in production at a time will only need a single release branch, but some products will have many releases present in production use.

A typical release branch will copy from the current mainline, but not allow any new features to added to it.

Note You are viewing the README for the development version of Capybara. If you are using the current release version you can find the README at