First, some background, we are in the process of moving all of our project teams over to using git and are in the process of laying down the guidelines for how the repositories should be organized so that certain branches can also be monitored for continuous integration and automatic deployment to the testing servers. Currently there are two models that are developing:Heavily influenced by the nvie.com article on successful branching with the master branch representing the most stable code, a development branch for the bleeding edge code, and an integration branch for code that is ready for QA testing. An alternate model in which the master branch represents the bleeding edge development code, an integration branch for code that is ready for QA testing, and a production branch for the stable code that is ready for deployment.At this point, it is partly a matter of semantics in regards to what the master branch represents, but is doing active development on the master branch actually a good practice or is it not really that relevant?
When using Git, is using the master branch for active development advisable?
git;branching
The only real defining feature of the master branch is that it's the default for some operations.  Also, branch names only have meaning within a specific repository.  My master might point to your development, for example.  Also, a master branch is not even required, so if there's any confusion about which branch it should be, my advice is usually to leave it out altogether.However, in my opinion, the best way to think of it is as the default for pushing to.  Most any online tutorials your developers read are going to assume that.  So, it makes a lot of sense to have master be whatever branch is most often pushed to.  Some people think of it as the pristine copy that is untouchable to developers except after the strictest of scrutiny, but using it that way removes a lot of the helpful defaults git provides.  If you want that kind of pristine branch, I would put it in a completely separate repository that only some people can write to.