1. Freeciv Release Cycle begins when previous version is branched to its own stable branch. Part of that branching process is setting new version numbers and other version specific things to master. Version number is initially of form ".90-dev" but can be increased during the development all the way to ".99-dev" (but it's usually a good idea to save some numbers for the next phase too) After that master is open for development of the features of the new version. This phase lasts at least one year. Master is always in development build mode, meaning that many extra debug and sanity checking features are turned on to catch problems from the new code as soon as possible.