I saw Jun He branched off branch-1.3. This may due to I suggested him to proceed on the release steps[1].
Take this chance I'd like to discuss when's the right time to branch off release. I prefer not to actually branch off too early cause we still need to work on several patches for 1.3 release. If we branch off this early then we need to cherry-pick patches between branches. Although that's also doable, we need to spend extra effort to maintain up coming patches for the master and 1.3 branch. My experience previously doing release is to branch off when I need to release a RC. RC may go from RC1 to RC3 or else. So for patches coming after RC, I'll pick them into release branch only if it fixes the issue for release. Of course, this way works just because we've relatively smaller scale of patches to deal with. For those large projects such as Hadoop and HBase, strict branch control prevents various feature interferes each other. Evans [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/BIGTOP/How+to+release
