[bonzini]

It looks more like merge. Chinese history and European history merged around 1200, and then again a few centuries later. American history and European history merged around 900 and then again in 1492.

But, why not both? Using interactive rebase lets you keep a clean and bisectable history made of small commits. The developer every now and then can also rebase to master and ensure that all commits pass the tests (and perhaps write more tests based on what happened in the meanwhile on the master branch).

However, when CI runs, features are included in master with a merge commit, so that the occasional semantic merge conflict will bisect exactly to the merge commit and the developer of the feature isn't blamed incorrectly.