In Ghostbusters, the famous saying was "Don't Cross the Streams". This isn't such a good motto in software development. If you branch from the main stream of development to do some work, you want to merge that stream back into the original one as soon as you can. The longer you wait, the more changes will be made in the original stream and the harder it will be to merge the two streams later. I've seen cases where a developer worked on a separate stream of code for several months. When they finally merged that stream in, the resulting build was so unstable that it was unusable for development for several weeks which affected the entire team. Go ahead, cross the streams.
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