Maintaining my own branch with git

[Andrea Venturoli]

Hello.

I know tons of messages have been written on the subject: I read them 
all, along with the Git Primer docs, but somehow I think I'm not doing 
it right and I cannot understand what I'm doing wrong.

I need to have some patches applied to both src and ports and distribute 
them to several machines.
So I have my own git server and I want to keep my own FreeBSD branches.

I cloned FreeBSD's git repository and pushed into my server; then I 
created my own branches.
The situation is now:
> % git remote
> freebsd
> netfence
> % git status
> On branch main
> Your branch is up to date with 'netfence/main'.
> 
> nothing to commit, working tree clean

So I'm on my own branch with my own differences wrt original freebsd's.

Now I issue:
1) git pull freebsd
2) git rebase freebsd/main
3) git push netfence --force



1) This does not merge, as I'm not on a "freebsd" branch. Ok, I think.

2) Here I have the first problem: rebasing is getting slower and slower. 
It almost looks like it's every time replaying history from the first 
day I started this to the current status. AFAICT, if I rebase now, 
everything from the past should be accounted for and forgotten. If I 
rebase tomorrow, I would expect only the new upstream commits to be 
taken into acount, but instead there are thousands of them.

3) Pushing without "--force" is not allowed as "the tip of your current 
branch is behind its remote counterpart. Integrate the remote changes 
(e.g. hint: 'git pull ...') before pushing again."


What's wrong with the above approach?

  bye & Thanks
	av.