title: Advantages Git tags vs Branches for version management
body: <p>I'm working on PHP-based web apps and we're looking to bring all our clients in-line. We'll be releasing each version and pushing it across to all the clients and holding back subsequent versions until every platform is up to the same version.</p>
  
  <p>For example, we're on version 4.0. 90% of our clients use version 4.0. A couple are behind and we're currently ready with version 4.01 in <em>development</em> branch. We can't roll out at this point so we may as well add new hot fixes to 4.01 while we wait to upgrade the last few clients to 4.0. We can also get started on version 4.1 which has features in addition to fixes.</p>
  
  <p>I'm trying to understand why it would be better to use tags than create a separate branch for 4.01. A separate branch seems to give more flexibility and also the deployment tools we use only have an option to deploy a branch, not a tag from a branch.</p>