Question

I am looking a github repo and I see refresh and next. Refresh has the latest updates to the current master version. What do these branch names generally mean?

Answer 1

A branch is there to isolate a development effort.
But its naming convention is left to the appreciation of the collaborators of that repo.

So ‘refresh’ and ‘next’ can have very different meanings, depending on the intent of said collaborators, and trying to infer a general definition for those branch names without knowing anything about the project is risky.

The Git repo for Git itself has 4 branches: “master”, “maint”, “next”, and “pu”.
In that repo, ‘next‘ means:

The “next” branch is to merge and test topic branches in the latter category [ie “more or less done and can now be tested by wider audience”].
In general, the branch always contains the tip of “master“. It might not be quite rock-solid production ready, but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.
I usually use “next” version of git for my own work, so it cannot be that broken to prevent me from integrating and pushing the changes out.
The “next” branch is where new and exciting things take place.