[tera1]

What you are describing sounds very much like a common situation when working downstream of an open source project. I believe (and agree) the commonly accepted solution are patch queues, for which a number of tools exist: Andrew Morton's patch scripts, quilt, mercurial queues, guilt, stgit, to name just a few.

As you describe, just maintaining a branch that regularly gets rebased onto the latest upstream using only git's inbuilt tools also works. I do that, it's a good enough solution when keeping the history of old branches by merging them into a "patch queue history" branch before rebasing so they don't get lost.

Yet, I feel a much better gui tool to support this workflow is both possible and desirable. I totally agree with the venerable schacon in that regard. So whenever I learn of a new git gui tool I get excited and hopeful.

I actually started a tool some 15 years ago, with the vague hope I could one day open source it, or at least show it around so that others can take the good ideas and run with them to implement in their tools. Unfortunately I never had enough time to move it forward beside my day job.

15 years ago I built atop mercurial queues with a Mac gui. Of course a proper tool should be built on top of a cross-platform gui and libgit2. I can't do much at the moment, but I still hope one day someone will build on my ideas or come up with better ones.