see what you were in the middle of doing, if anything.

see which branches haven’t been merged into master yet. Likewise for any other integration branches e.g. maint , next and seen .

read mails, save ones that are applicable, and save others that are not quite ready (other mail readers are available).

apply them, interactively, with your sign-offs.

create topic branch as needed and apply, again with sign-offs.

rebase internal topic branch that has not been merged to the master or exposed as a part of a stable branch.

restart seen every time from the next.

and bundle topic branches still cooking.

backport a critical fix.

create a signed tag.

make sure master was not accidentally rewound beyond that already pushed out.

In the output from git show-branch , master should have everything ko/master has, and next should have everything ko/next has, etc.