Yes, always. Of course I make mistakes, but the idea is that any patch I put up for review, if it cleanly applies, should not break any user and any tests. It's much more liberating knowing that bisects actually work and each commit does exactly what it says on the tin (no followup "fix"/"minor" commits that actually do something completely different). Incremental improvements are compatible with this approach. Also see https://gist.github.com/thoughtpolice/9c45287550a56b2047c631... .