I hate breaking the build! So I have been looking for ways to use a
version control system to help me avoid it.

Currently I mostly work in SVN trunk, with the ocational feature branch
for large changes. The constant danger when I work in trunk is that I
start fixing two bugs at the same time, but try to commit the fixes
separately. If I screw that up it will sometimes break the build. Alas!

Now I found a blog-post by Frederic Jean describing a workflow (with git) that I think is what I was looking for. It sounds a bit complicated, but I will probably give it a try to see if it is worth the effort.