Keeping version branches/tags as branches in the git masters probably makes sense; though there's also a separate 'tag' concept in git.
So called lightweight tags (what you get with 'git tag') are actually almost completely identical to branches. The only difference is that tags live in a different namespace, which is only an UI-level distinction though. Annotated and signed tags ('git tag -a', 'git tag -s') are a bit more different, because they introduce an intermediary tag object which in turn points to the actual commit. These objects enable a tag messages as opposed to the commit message. Due to the recent kernel.org problems, I would strongly recommend looking at doing signed tags. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.4.61.188 (talk • contribs) 00:09, 6 October 2011