merging default into stable

[venizio krups]

hello list,

at work we run one repo with two named branches: default, and stable,
and the workflow is similar to that of mercurial main tree. bugfixes,
and known to be stable changes, go into the stable branch which then
gets merged into default. we are now ready for the next major release
which brings me to my question.  would it be better to merge default
into stable, or to just tag default as released, and re-restart the
stable branch later on when needed?

what approach will mercurial take?

thanks for any feedback.

-venizio