There is history and there is cleanness, as Linus Torvalds explained in http://lwn.net/Articles/328438/ http://lwn.net/Articles/328438/. The git way of doing w

There is history and there is cleanness, as Linus Torvalds explained in http://lwn.net/Articles/328438/ http://lwn.net/Articles/328438/. The git way of doing what the OP wants to do is to develop all code on local branches. They're cheap and you can have as many of them as you want. Just never commit directly to master and set it to track upstream/master. Synchronize with upstream by pulling into your local master, and then rebase, merge & diff your local branches at will.