Git Discipline: combining multiple feature branches, but still keeping them separate?

Question

The current project I'm working on, I am trying to explore a bunch of different ideas which usually manifest themselves as a bunch of feature branches. The features I'm working on are generally orthogonal to one another, so there are times when I want to merge all of these features (or some subset of the features) and test them out together.

So far my workflow has been this -- I have branches featureA, featureB, featureC and I'll have a branch called featureA_featureB and then another one like featureA_featureB_featureC, etc.

I am having 2 problems:

• The naming scheme is terribly cumbersome and generates a lot of branch clutter
• Since I'm testing the branch with the features that are merged together, I tend to accidentally commit to the combination branch rather than the individual branch. So for example, I think of an improvement to featureC, but since I'm in the featureA_featureC branch, I accidentally commit to this branch instead (I really need to stop using git commit -a). Then I have to cherry pick the commit or do some other crazy stuff to get the commit to the right place.
• I just feel like there's some better way to accomplish this...

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I was going to write an answer of my own, but then I found this great answer (and a great question). It does not give you a single way to do things, but upon a careful reading, you should be able to find a workflow that suits your situation.