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1.4.2. 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 (see Section 1.5, “PHPUnit tests”).
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.