It's worth pointing out that the entire point is that you use SHORT-LIVED feature branches. The long-lived branches are the releases that you need to support.

It's worth pointing out that the entire point is that you use SHORT-LIVED feature branches. The long-lived branches are the releases that you need to support. You're basically formalizing a working copy by calling it a branch; with the added advantage of being able to make a nice clean set of commits ready for code review. I introduced using short-lived feature branches with rebase/merge after having a great experience doing something similar with Perforce. Gitflow simply adds a master which contains only releases and formal fix-bug-on-release-merge-back-to-development rules.