So my friend is using Git for one of his projects, and I'm going to be contributing to it, but I want to set it up a little differently than he has it set up right now. Right now, the main repo sit in, say /blah/blah/a/. He has a clone on his computer, and he just pushes to /blah/blah/a/ when he's done making changes. What I'd like to do is clone /blah/blah/a/ into something like /blah/blah/b/ or blah/blah/testbed/, and then I'll clone /blah/blah/testbed/ and all the changes I make I can push to testbed, make sure it works right, and then push to /blah/blah/a/. Does that 1) Make sense as a pattern and 2) Lend itself well to being implemented in git? Can I clone a clone like that, and cascade the pushes?

Can't recall how to do it off the top of my head, but you should be able to use git-branch, then when you are ready to push those changes back to the main branch use git merge.

I don't think I want to branch, though. I just want to clone to one spot, and then clone that clone, and then be able to commit back up the tree.

I'd have to agree with lafferjm on the fact that it sounds like you want a branch. Git makes branches and merging them really easy and that seems to be what you want. You would clone his tree, make your own branch and then you can clone your branch.