I don't have anything to contribute about how you want to handle the Debian branches et al. As to your mainline-based repository branches, I can tell you that individual topic branches that I can review individually and then merge directly are what I will merge into mainline most efficiently. I understand it might be an unusual amount of hassle to tease interdependent changes out right now when there is such a backlog. For cases in the current backlog where such issues look like they'll be a big time-sink, we can just play it by ear and maybe do some chunkier merges. I hope we can before long catch up so that there aren't so many things floating around and individual topic branches will be easy enough to use.
Thanks, Roland
