Oliver Steele lives in Western Massachusetts and commutes to downtown LA, where he is bringing an operating system from handwaving to reality. He was the architect of OpenLaszlo, the author of PyWordNet and other open source projects. His interests include programming languages, knowledge representation, information visualization, and math education. [more]
What you describe sounds no different from using a branch, except that by checkpointing into the index, you're losing all of your recent history.