Distributed bug tracking

The local commit thing means that (a) you can use the version control system to checkpoint
states where you've done some good work, but it's currently broken as a whole, and you're
about to risk totally messing everything up; (b) you can commit your state before resolving
conflicts with other people's work, so you can retry resolving if you mess up in your first
attempt and lose all your work; (c) you can look at what you've committed and realize that
it's ugly, incomplete, or something like that, after you've put together exactly what you're
planning to send in but before you send it; (d) you can do a dozen related commits, each
self-contained, and as a set leading up to the last one, which adds a feature, and you can
deliver the set together; (e) before you submit a series, you can reorganize it into small,
clean commits that total the big chunk of work you've done.

My experience is that centralized systems lead to commits that each make all the changes
necessary to implement a feature, but touch a lot of different parts of the code, while
distributed systems lead to small focused commits, which are separate changes but all arrive
at once.