title: How can I rebase my new code atop of old .tar.gz archives of old versions?
body: <p>I'm working on a project where the original developer  created .tar.gz's for each new release.  I took the latest release, put it in .git, and add my patches atop of it.</p>
  <p>After many commits and changes over the past few months, the old developer has asked me to become the maintainer and put it on github.  I would like rebase so all old .tar.gz releases exist as a single commit, and then place my commits on top of those to keep the old releases in git history but maintain my existing commit history.</p>
  <p>(Since this is the first ever commit to be pushed publicly via git, I don't care about clobbering the git-hash history with rebase.)</p>
  <p>This explanation has two .git trees: the old historical tree with single-commit .tar.gz's that I call &quot;historical&quot; and another that I call &quot;new&quot; with my commits that need to show up on top of all historical commits.  To do this I tried the following:</p>
  <h3>Part 1, prepared the historical tree:</h3>
  <ol>
  <li>Started a historical .git tree with <code>git init</code></li>
  <li>Committed the .tar.gz's one at a time with comments for the release</li>
  </ol>
  <h3>Part 2, tried to rebase on the historical tree as a remote:</h3>
  <ol>
  <li>On the &quot;new&quot; tree I did a <code>git remote add historical /path/to/historical-tree</code></li>
  <li>Went to a temp testing branch with <code>git checkout -b before-historical-rebase</code></li>
  <li>Tried <code>git rebase historical</code></li>
  <li>Got lots of merge conflicts labeled &quot;both modified&quot; and a few &quot;deleted by me&quot;</li>
  </ol>
  <p>I thought since the end of the last .tar.gz was the same as the beginning of my first commit that this would be clean, but either my commit history at the border of the last .tar.gz version and my first commit isn't as clean as I thought or there is a better way to do this.</p>
  <p>How would you approach this?</p>