interactive rebase of binary files?

With the help of some friends, I now have an understanding of how to tease interleaved commits out of a branch (dev, branched from master), into two new branches (foo and bar, branched from dev):

git checkout dev git checkout -b foo git rebase -i master #rebase everything SINCE master etc., repeat for bar...

However, there is a problem with binary files. For example, if I specify "edit" in the git-rebase-todo list for one of the binary file commits, only one version of the binary file is presented to me in the working copy. If it were a text file, I'd expect to see the standard conflict stuff within the one file. I'd edit and save that one file. However, in the case of binary files, should I not see binary_file.a and binary_file.b both in the working copy, so that I can compare and pick a winner (or edit one of them into a winner)?

More likely, my expectations are due to my ignorance, and someone can point me to the "git" way of doing this. Please?

Phil Lawrence