[sidcool]

It can't be avoided, but we do tend to try and minimize it.

[fishtoaster]

My experience has been that maximizing merges works best. If you're constantly merging, hardly any of your merges have any friction. The longer you're separate from the master branch, the more likely you are to get painful merges with conflicts and subtle bugs.

[erichurkman]

Elsewhere in the thread, you'll see that 'sidcool is on SVN, where merging is not a fun experience — which explains his team's aversion to merges.