[glanotte]

I don't think the point is that you should pull rarely. I think the key there is _my_ tree and he later refers to a branch named linus. I would suspect that he maintains his own development tree that gets pushed to the central repository and then merged to master when he feels it is ready. But prior to it getting merged, it is random and subject to his own rebasing.

I have a similar flow, I might maintain multiple feature branches but I will pull and rebase master very regularly to be sure I am working against the most recent code base. I will also rebase my work to squash commits to create a clean history prior to moving work from my feature branches to master. So if someone was to pull in one of my feature branches prior to it being merged or tagged, that tree would very likely change and then we have two versions of my work that would create a merge nightmare when we decided to get everything into master.