cookbook question

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