title: Should I ever have long-term feature branches in Git Flow?
body: <p>I am using Git Flow with a team. We all branch off of develop for features and merge back in after code review. It works well for us, however we now have one feature that will take a developer over a month to complete. We will have a few releases over this time.</p>
  
  <p>A few questions to fuel this:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>How should we handle this?</li>
  <li>Should we handle it this way?</li>
  <li>Or should we chop the feature up into smaller merge requests?</li>
  <li>If we chop it up, and it is a public project, how do we ensure that pieces of this feature don't affect the ongoing releases?</li>
  <li>Is merging develop into this long-term feature branch really that bad? My peers are concerned that it is anti-pattern.</li>
  <li>If we don't merge develop consistently back into this long-term feature, couldn't there be bad consequences when the feature is finally complete? </li>
  </ul>