Making 'temporary' commits and rewriting local history before pushing to a shared repo has analogs in other revision control systems:

* In Subversion, people track patches using tools like quilt to manage them before actually putting them together into a commit.

* In Mercurial, people use `hg mq` which is like a more featureful version `git-stash`.

These are basically all ways to track a series of patches prior to 'committing' them into the code base shared with others.