title: how to use git rebase to clean up a convoluted history
body: <p>After working for several weeks with a half dozen different branches and merges, on both my laptop and work and my desktop at home, my history has gotten a bit convoluted.  For example, I just did a fetch, then merged master with origin/master.  Now, when I do git show-branches, the output looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre>
  ! [login] Changed domain name.
   ! [master] Merge remote branch 'origin/master'
    ! [migrate-1.9] Migrating to 1.9.1 on Heroku
     ! [rebase-master] Merge remote branch 'origin/master'
  ----
   - - [master] Merge remote branch 'origin/master'
   + + [master^2] A bit of re-arranging and cleanup.
   - - [master^2^] Merge branch 'rpx-login'
   + + [master^2^^2] Commented out some debug logging.
   + + [master^2^^2^] Monkey-patched Rack::Request#ip
   + + [master^2^^2~2] dump each request to log
  ....
  </pre>
  
  <p>I would like to clean this up with a git rebase.  I created a new branch, rebase-master, for this purpose, and on this branch tried git rebase &lt;common-ancestor&gt;.  However, I have to resolve many conflicts, and the end result on branch rebase-master no longer matches the corresponding version on master, which has already been tested and works! </p>
  
  <p>I thought I saw a solution to this somewhere but can't find it anymore.  Does anyone know how to do this?  Or will these convoluted ref names go away when I start deleting un-needed branches that I have already merged with?</p>
  
  <p>I am the sole developer on this project, so there is no one else who will be affected.   </p>