...

Glossary

• integration branch - in In Mifos land, this is the "master" branch in the head git repo at sf.net. All bleeding-edge development code is integrated and tested on this branch.
• release maintenance branch - Releases are sometimes augmented by minor updates while excluding new features and non-critical bugfixes. These types of changes are recorded on separate branches.

Procedure

In preparation for a release, a release maintenance branch is created.

...

If you accidentally commit something to master first that also should be in the release maintenance branch, just cherry pick it from master. Future "git merges " from the release maintenance branch to master will do the right thing.

...