Beware of making high-risk changes (such as consensus changes, p2p layer changes and wallet/transaction changes) too close to a new release, because they will not get as much testing as they should. Don't merge large branches which haven't undergone lots of testing just before a release.
It is best to keep doc/relnotes/README.md up to date as changes and bug fixes are made. It's more work to summarize all changes and bugfixes just before the release.
## Check for changes on master that should be on dev
Often there are trivial changes made directly on master, such as documentation changes. In theory, no code changes should happen on master without being on dev first, but it's better to be safe than sorry. We want the dev branch which undergoes testing to be as close as possible to what the master branch will become, so we don't want to merge dev into master and just assume everything works. So it's best to merge the master branch into dev just before merging the dev branch into master.
