Mercurial development process: mainline branching

[J. Lewis Muir]

At

  http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/DeveloperRepos

it says the following about the main Mercurial repository:

  "No new features are going to the stable branch, mainline
  (the default branch) will be branched again near each
  release."

I only see two branches in the main repository: default and
stable.  So does this mean that when Matt Mackall branches
mainline to create the new stable branch, it is branched with
the name "stable" (e.g. "hg branch -f stable"), thus *replacing*
the previous branch named "stable"?

Thanks,

Lewis