Yup ditto (and I'd assume most participants in this thread are also local VCS gurus) - and I've still had two occurrences in my professional life where I looked

Yup ditto (and I'd assume most participants in this thread are also local VCS gurus) - and I've still had two occurrences in my professional life where I looked at the git conflict and just bailed - reading the original branch for inspiration but essentially just rewriting the change over a new and completely different system. Thankfully those were pretty early on and I think solid unit tests can really shine when it comes to trying to resolve merge conflicts. My biggest fear in rebasing/merging is that there's a function "doStuff(foo, bar, baz)" which still presents the same function signature but which had its effective code contract completely wrecked by some concurrent changes. Git is wonderful - but git can't do anything if it looks like everything in the files you're touching didn't change... but they secretly did change because there's a mess of interwoven logic between your file and another file.