Preparing Feature Branches

Private Branches

If the topic branch in question is a local, private branch, that you are not sharing with other developers, the simplest and easiest method to stay up to date with master is to use the rebase command. This will append all of your feature branch commits into a linear history after the last commit on the master branch.

$ git checkout feature
$ git rebase master
			

Do note that this changes the commit ID for each commit in your feature branch, which will cause trouble for anyone sharing and/or following your branch. In this case, if you have rebased a branch that other users are watching or working on, they can fix the resulting conflict by rebasing their copy of your branch onto your branch:

$ git checkout feature
$ git fetch remote/feature
$ git rebase remote/feature
			

Public Branches

For any publicly-shared branches, where other users may be watching your feature branches, or cloning them locally for development work, you'll need to take a different approach to keeping it up to date with master.

To bring public branch up to date, you'll need to merge the current master branch, which will create a special "merge commit" in the branch history, causing a logical "split" in commit history where your branch started and joining at the merge. These merge commits are generally disliked, because they can crowd commit history, and because the history is no longer linear. They will be dealt with during the submission process.

$ git checkout feature
$ git merge master
			

At this point, you can push the branch to your public repository, and anyone following the branch can then pull the changes directly into their local branch, either with another merge, or with a rebase, as necessitated by the public or private status of their own changes.