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Switching branches is cheap, I'd say the "right" way to get a tree like you want is to have two or even five branches all the time you're working. But I suspect you could make two branches and cherry-pick different sets of commits onto them to get the result you're after. To my mind it wouldn't be worth the effort though; how often do you really care whether the code worked with only 1 and 4 applied?

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Right, I would say that it isn't worth the effort. Also, I probably never care about the code with only 1 and 4 applied. So perhaps branches aren't the right way to do what I am describing.

I always saw VC as a systematic way to keep a log of my development so that I could figure out where I may have broken my code. For this purpose, having some sort of meta-data where commits can be grouped would be nice. It would also work to do something like always end my commit messages with some kind of meta-data tag that I could grep the log for. I was just wondering if there was a prescribed/built-in way for Git to handle this.

git-bisect is the standard tool for figuring out where you broke something. I don't know what it does with branching histories though, I tend to effectively linearise my history by rebasing each branch on the trunk head before merging it.

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