R – If there are “known issues” why release?

I've seen the word RC used in two ways:

1. As an actual release candidate. This is the build we are going to ship to customers unless we find some showstopper. No new builds will be made until a major bug is found, then a new build is spun and we start again. Typically anywhere from 3-10 of these builds exist before shipping.
2. As a "better-than-beta" build. There is no intention of actually shipping the build, it is just an interim checkpoint somewhere between beta and release. Typically there are no new features over the beta, just stability. This is how Microsoft has used the term on the Windows team in recent years (Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista).

I prefer the first use myself. It makes much more sense.

we are having a similar setup except we have more than 300 dedicated developers, we have exactly what you described several revision we need to deliver to different customers.

We have divided it so we have an initial ref like refs/heads/platformX.Y/ then we build on that

So depending on what you need to do you checkout platformX.Y/develop and start working from that point on a feature branch and you merge back to develop when you are done.

This works for us and we can follow the nvie model.

on top of everything we are merging all these platformX.Y branch to our main develop branch so errors corrected on those branches are released in to the latest software as well.