Comment by d2p

Working on a separate branch may still require periodically bringing in changes from master (eg. to resolve conflicts). The options are either a) a merge commit or b) a rebase. A rebase will require a `--force` push. Some people prefer merges, but personally I prefer rebasing - I like to keep my full history even when merging back to master, since it's not a lot of extra effort and it can be useful when tracking down issues in old code :)