The $subject question comes up from time to time, with developers wondering if they should do anything with those branches. Simple answer is, no, you should completely ignore them. They exist solely as a convenience in testing pull requests prior to merging them. Often we want to test multiple pull requests in one lot (mostly to save time.) To do that we can merge the PRs onto the relevant *-next branch, force push the result out to github, and the lightning test server will automatically detect the change to that branch and run a full test. DO NOT base your own work on these *-next branches as we make no promise about maintaining a linear flow of commits. If some pull request fails testing, the next time we use the *-next branches we'll simply make the offending commits disappear. -- Brian Stansberry Principal Software Engineer JBoss by Red Hat