[SkySkimmer]

>What I really want is to for git to treat each commit as a repository state, so that removing indentation from the state at commit A means that the patch for commit B adds all the indentation

`git rebase -X theirs` seems like it should be close, but commit B will only override conflicting chunks (so a change from A which doesn't conflict with B will persist, this shouldn't be a problem for your use case)