Just my 2?: I've followed mlt and kdenlive from git past few years and developed some fixes in feature branches, and if needed rebased those fixes to newer master branch versions.
Branching, merging and rebasing (fast forwarding branches to newer baseline) are so easy in git that they don't need to be defined. Just treat git master branch as svn trunk, but revert commits or features if they cause problems, and use feature branches for development. Feature and other (merge?) branches can be published on demand. I've found that the next branches confuse things a bit amongst developers and contributors. -Mikko
