It depends on exactly what workflow you're trying to accomplish!)
The parent comment seemed to be about a workflow where the repos are in sync. If you're carrying patches around and you don't want to export them, you are probably going to merging them. In either scenario if you have some patches you want to export and some you don't want to export, you'll either have to carry two trees, or do cherry-picking or something similar.
https://github.com/josh-project/josh
We've been using josh at TVL for years and it's just amazing.