[pm215]

My definition of "too large to review in one piece" is "more than 200-250 lines", so most non-trivial changes benefit in my view from being split into clean patchsets. It is extra effort that's purely to reduce the code review workload, so it makes most sense when the project is very short of code review resources and the reviewers aren't all the same small set of people as the coders (ie not all working for the same company). Keeping a clean set of commits gets easier with practice though, especially if you do it as you go along rather than trying to do it all at the end. I like stgit for tooling that allows you to think of your branch as a stack of patches and avoid the horrible UI of raw git rebase.