[sanderjd]

It's simple: you're into working off of the newest state of the world as much as possible and I'm into working off of a snapshot of the world as much as possible and then merging in my snapshot plus modifications when I'm done. I think your way sounds like it deals with changes to the world more often than I want to, and also loses the context of what your commits looked like when you actually made them, but it's a fine way of doing things, and is especially useful if you're submitting changes to a project for somebody else to merge.