[tylorr]

It helps if you keep unrelated code in separate commits. That way all you have to do is rearrange and merge commits. It gets more complicated if you have to split commits. I've been wanting to make a GUI for this purpose that allows you to drag and drop hunks/commits. Essentially a GUI for interactive rebase.

And yes, don't change history others have seen, but do it as much as you need locally.

EDIT: typo/clarity

[convolvatron]

what this really means in practice is "never branch off anything but master"

which is ok for maintenance bug fixes, but precludes a lot of interesting workflows involving speculative work, late binding the order of commits, early integration branches, etc.

my workaround for this usually just involves doing what i want up front, and then abandoning git for the merge process (since my history is polluted by false conflicts), constructing diffs and applying them as single commits against master.

which works, its just a bit silly