You talk about 'long running branch'. I would say that as soon as you have a 'long running branch' you have already lost. Good git practices or bad git practice

You talk about 'long running branch'. I would say that as soon as you have a 'long running branch' you have already lost. Good git practices or bad git practices don't really matter. You will suffer anyway. The only way to make it better is to find a way to do your changes while avoiding the long running branch. I have seen a long running branch that lived some five years or so. It was horrible. And it would have been possible, in this case, to avoid most of the problems using a feature switch instead.