Good points, and we're doing almost exactly that, with one difference. I think it's worth having 2 branches you ship from: master and production (or, in revers

Good points, and we're doing almost exactly that, with one difference. I think it's worth having 2 branches you ship from: master and production (or, in reverse, master and development). The reason is that this way, if you're in the middle of some relatively large and untested changes in the development branch, you still have a copy of exactly what's on production to work on in case there's an urgent patch that needs to go out. This is not strictly necessary, of course, but we've found that it's saved us some hassles.