Yes, we should continue to make use of release branches. I just don't want them to live *too* long. We'll keep stable-77x around for backports of bug fixes if that's the release that makes it into Debian stable, of course.
I think what I'm trying to say here is that we should never let svn head get "very" unstable. We did that last year and by the time we got it finished, there were so many bugs in it that we didn't catch in our own testing, that it became quite a setback to get it stable again.
