So if you e.g. want to abandon the conflict-fixing, and do some things on your branch to make merging easier first, you've got to use a special command, and it's different depending on whether you were merging or rebasing (which is still a great improvement over a year or so ago, when you had to do an incantation like git reset --hard HEAD^). Contrast with svn where abandoning a merge is just a "svn revert" like any other.