tags vs branches in git [closed]

Question

We have a large rails project that runs on a production and staging server. Is it a good idea to create tags everytime we deploy to staging or production (this would happen automatically with capistrano). Or is better to create branches named "devlopment" and "staging", (master would contain the production status)?

Answer 1

Tags in git are pretty long-lived: they automatically propagate when you fetch from a remote repository, and if you want to clean them up you have to do so manually in every copy. Therefore, I'd rather use branches (and possibly their reflogs) for marking automatic deployment, because otherwise I'd probably be buried in lots of tags very soon.