Reference for git.git release process

Hi I'm relatively new to git and I've been reading the git.git notes about how git itself is maintained, as I'm interested in using a similar workflow. I've read the MaintNotes document, the howto/maintain-git.txt addendum, and Documentation/gitworkflows.txt.

I believe I understand reasonably well the concepts presented in those three documents. However, those documents have a lot of detail about the development process, but not much about the release process.

One question about the dev process:

1) I don't see any topic branches available in git.git. Are these
generally kept in a private repo and/or shared between individual
developer's public repositories?

Some questions about the release process:

1) After a release is made (master is tagged with vX.Y.Z), is the
maint branch deleted and recreated from the new release tag? e.g.

git branch -d maint git branch maint master

2) MaintNotes states:

"After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving topics"

Does this mean:

git branch -d next git checkout -b next master git merge ai/topic1_to_cook_in_next git merge ai/topic2_to_cook_in_next ...

Lastly, I note that the gitk --all representation of a repository maintained in this way is very difficult to follow (at least for me) because of all the merging. Are there some canned gitk invocations that can be used to make the visualization of the integration and topic branches more intuitive?

Thank you all very much for an excellent tool.

Cheers, Raman