Caffe will switch to a one branch development workflow to reduce friction and confusion. All development will branch from and merge to master. Tags will mark releases. Official feature branches will host radical or involved changes to not block routine development and releases.

• no overhead for core developers handling back-merges and release merges
• no confusion about where to contribute PRs
• release tagging still gives stable checkpoints for downstream

Historically Caffe development has followed a master (stable) and dev (unstable) branch model. This lets research live at the bleeding edge in dev while applications stem from master. Experimental ideas can be tried out in dev, hammered out, then bundled into release merges to master. This isn't sustainable.

Of course master and dev need to be reconciled to found the one branch workflow. This should be accomplished with the next release, which will be soon. Open PRs can still be checked out and merged. We're still deciding how and when exactly to coordinate all this.