What do I do that doesn't get committed?
Debugging builds trying to track down the graphic issues (although I've got a new idea to try to track it down, that goes back to the older stuff in svn)
Modifying the make scripts to make sure that there's a locally compiled map ready when I type "make".
At one point, when I had some files on an external drive for space reasons, I had some symbolic links and needed to modify some "find" commands in the makefiles to include (I think) -L
Sometimes I've had to play around with configure.
Branches
With SVN, I could make a local modification (such as to the Makefiles, or debugging output in the renderer), and then move around from revision to revision, and my changes stay in. So if I'm trying to track something in rendering, I can.
The point is?
It sounds like the only way to play with git is to commit everything that you do.
That sounds like saying that you have to allow anyone that wants to play with the source to commit changes to the development tree.
Unless I'm missing something, that's horrible.
What is supposed to be git's benefit over svn?