Comment 4 for bug 1327773

I did some experiments this evening with git rebase (merely to teach myself what it really does).
For the 'derivative' use-case (merge with push, similar to ocb merging from odoo), rebase would not work.
For the 'apply-patch' use-case, rebase would work but would require prior revert (reset --hard origin/master, actually)

PS: I think your implementation of revert() lacks the origin/ prefix, since the intent is indeed to revert to the remote commit.
In bzr and hg, there's no distinction after pull of remote and local heads, but merges are local modifications, whereas in git a merge is a commit and makes a difference between origin/master and master (if not pushed)