A few notes from the field on git

Any time a source code management system gets in your way it's not doing its job. It's really something you should have to think about as little as possible. One thing I found out by doing it the wrong way the other day is that of you create a pull request on bitbucket or github, you really need to do it on a topic branch created just for the purpose. After the upstream repo you have sent the pull request to has merged your changes you can delete the branch. Cleaning up after I unthinkingly sent a pull request for the node-postgres driver from a long-lived branch was rather ugly.

I also wish it were possibly to exclude certain files (e.g. regression test result files) from having trailing whitespace colored. But if it is possible I have yet to find that way.