Clarify the role of the 'maint' branch

I’m trying to understand the development flow of the Erlang/OTP project. For that I read the “Branches” section in the wiki, however, I still don’t understand the role of the maint branch.

According to the wiki: Branches · erlang/otp Wiki · GitHub

“”"
maint is a maintenance branch used for the upcoming minor OTP-XX.Y releases. We only merge tested changes to the maint branch (and simple changes that are obviously correct). You can safely base branches on the maint branch. It will not be rewound. Typically, everything in the maintenance branch will be included in the next release.
The maintenance branch should not include any new features, the focus of this branch is bug fixes and improvements.
“”"

Can anybody clarify what this paragraph means ?

The maint branch contains all changes that will be part of the next maintainance patch (aka minor release). Right now it contains what will be part of 27.2 and once 27.2 is released, it will contain the things that will be part of 27.3.

Anything specific in the paragraph that you quoted that is unclear?

Hey, thanks for the answer. :slight_smile:

Yeah, that’s what I understood from reading the wiki. But then I don’t understand the difference between maint and maint-27, hence the confusion.

My guess is maint is about 27.2 and maint-27 is about 27.1.3 ? Is that correct?

Yes, that is correct. The maint-27 branch tracks the urgent fixes that we make while maint collects non-urgent fixes and features that we collect into a bundle release roughly every quarter.