The main reason you don't want to rebase published code is to avoid inconveniencing other people. But that doesn't imply that code that's under heavy developme

The main reason you don't want to rebase published code is to avoid inconveniencing other people. But that doesn't imply that code that's under heavy development and may need rebased should always be hidden from the world and kept totally private. One workflow I've seen other projects use -- that I've also adopted for my own projects -- is to have a separate (non-private) branch called "pu" (pending updates) or "wip" (work in progress). With warnings in the developer docs that this branch may be rebased at any time. In short, keep code that you're willing to rebase clearly delineated from the code you're not, tell other people that it may be rebased in the future, and let them decide whether the benefit of pulling the code today outweighs the drawback of potentially being inconvenienced by a rebase tomorrow.