sharing git work while downstream from svn?

How do others manage distributed version control when everyone is forced to rebase all the time?

To give a concrete example: in one project where I have this issue, there's a developer who is effectively 'downstream' from me. There's a few other developers who are peers, w/ commit bits set on the centralized server. I'll make some patches that should end up on our centralized trunk, and some that our for our experimental sub-project, so I use format-patch and send patches around for those.

This gets to be a mess when trunk changes: I'll rebase + potentially fix some conflicts. Other developers with some of the experimental patches will svn update, and get similar conflicts. These might differ in subtle ways, and now exchanging patches gets more difficult.

I'm not sure getting them to use git would even help. Once I rebase, I screw my downstream. Yet I can't avoid rebasing since I need to update.

As I recall, some members of the gcc community are handling this problem, somehow. How do you do it? Or do you just not collaborate at the git level?

Thanks,

-tom