Until 2020, DEP-14 suggested <vendor>/master. The use of "master" became undesired if a better word was available. See https://inclusivenaming.org/
DEP-14 was already using upstream/latest so for parallel construction, <vendor>/latest was kind of an obvious choice. Note that DEP-14 explicitly allows you to use debian/unstable and debian/experimental if you want. As has already been mentioned earlier in this thread, the Debian GNOME renamed all our branches from debian/master to debian/latest a year and a half ago. And for our specific workflow, using debian/latest (or debian/master before) proved better since at the time of packaging, we don't always know whether we will upload to unstable or experimental. For most of our packages, once we upload to Experimental, it is rare to upload to Unstable again. GNOME is on a 6-month release cycle so there is only a small amount of time, usually after GNOME Beta, where we stage some things in experimental before they are ready for upload to Unstable. If we do need to upload to Unstable when a package is already in Experimental, we use a short-lived debian/trixie branch. If the development cycle is long enough, that short-lived branch gets re-created (this was done with libadwaita-1 for a new GNOME series). At or near new stable release time, a permanent debian/trixie branch is created which allows for merge requests for stable updates. As Simon pointed out, long-lived development would probably work better with a debian/experimental branch. I think many Debian packages never or only rarely use Experimental so debian/latest is probably best practice for most packages. Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
