Let's suppose that a week has passed since you started working on your private branch. Your new feature isn't finished yet, but at the same time you know that other people on your team continue to make important changes in the project's /trunk. It's in your best interest to replicate those changes to your own branch, just to make sure they mesh well with your changes. This is done by performing a sync merge—a merge operation designed to bring your branch up to date with any changes made to its ancestral parent branch since your branch was created.