cookbook question

[Kyle Rose <krose@krose.org>]

In maintaining a postfix config that differs maybe 10% between two 
different machines, I have a "common" branch that has ???? in the fields 
that differ.  I realized after speaking with one of the git developers a 
few weeks ago that I really should be using git-rebase to fix up the 
machine-specific branches when I make a change to the common branch.  
Unfortunately, the merge history was screwed up enough such that doing

git rebase -s ours origin/common

replaced one machine-specific config with the other, which is not what I 
wanted.

In order to reset things to a state in which git-rebase would be useful, 
I did the following:

git diff origin/common >/tmp/diff
git reset --hard origin/common
patch -p1 </tmp/diff
git commit -a -m 'reintroduce changes'

which works fine, but is obviously not the right way to do this.  What 
*is* the right way to accomplish this?  Essentially, I'm trying to reset 
the rebase point such that git won't rewind earlier when trying to do 
subsequent rebases.

Kyle