[U-Boot] Merge Process

Hi all, We have, here at Ubicom http://www.ubicom.com, an ongoing process to port u-boot to our architecture. Last week we decided to merge the upstream u-boot codes to our local branch on which had forked from the upstream branch about 8 months ago.We successfully managed to merge remote master branch to our local branch. Is that the correct way of doing this? I mean, should we synchronize with master branch? Is there any convention for the merge process?

Regards, Cem