no, the integration branch is not "broken", its just not complete until all slices have been merged INTO the integration branch - after all slices have been merged, the integration branch is complete, yet has a non-optimal history (and most likely a wrong blame because of how git resolves the blame), - therefore the "kokomeco" branch is created after the slices have been merged, - there the original intended merge is done because the outcome of the conflicts is already known from the integration + slice branch merges.
Feel free to open issues/questions in the repo if you're interested, I merely stumble by ycombinator
mergetopus is a tool that helps teams follow a structured workflow for very large merges by splitting one risky merge into parallelizable tasks:
* one integration branch for trivial/non-conflicting merge results
* optional slice branches for selected conflicted files
* original annotate/blame information is retained