OP here. I agree with this as well, you are not missing anything. I was meaning to write another post about a similar approach.
To illustrate to readers, let's say we are developing over a tag `v1.2-pre` in `main`, and now the code has stabilized. The idea is to release a tagged `v1.2`, then in the `main` branch immediately release a tagged `v1.3-pre` that follows it.
We obtain the following:
1) `main` branch commits look like `v1.3-pre-<number>-g<hash>` in `git-describe`.
2) A maintenance branch may have been forked from the commit that was tagged with `v1.2`, so for the commits in that `release/1.2` branch you automatically get `v1.2-<number>-g<hash>` as output of `git describe`.
To illustrate to readers, let's say we are developing over a tag `v1.2-pre` in `main`, and now the code has stabilized. The idea is to release a tagged `v1.2`, then in the `main` branch immediately release a tagged `v1.3-pre` that follows it.
We obtain the following:
1) `main` branch commits look like `v1.3-pre-<number>-g<hash>` in `git-describe`.
2) A maintenance branch may have been forked from the commit that was tagged with `v1.2`, so for the commits in that `release/1.2` branch you automatically get `v1.2-<number>-g<hash>` as output of `git describe`.