Regarding conflicts, I don't see how merge vs rebase makes a difference. If some other change sneaks in before yours and causes conflicts, well, you'll have to

Regarding conflicts, I don't see how merge vs rebase makes a difference. If some other change sneaks in before yours and causes conflicts, well, you'll have to fix them -- rebase or merge makes no difference. Incidentally, I have a script for rebasing a branch across thousands of commits that "bisects" so that for any conflicts you're always rebasing across one commit. I.e., first it tries to rebase across all upstream commits, and if there's no conflicts, it's done, else it picks the N/2'th commit to rebase onto, and repeats, then when it's it restarts from whichever commit it ended up at.