It only "messes up revision history" if you do your development on your remote tracking branch that multiple people are pushing to. If you keep your remote tracking branch clean (e.g. master), you can pull into master whenever you want, merge your changes from a local branch, and push it right back out. Done this way, you never have to use pull --rebase (which will rewrite local history).

This workflow actually works pretty well with your desired outcome as well - you can rebase your local branch against newly pulled changes on master. This will make all of your local branch merges look like fast forward merges on master (i.e. no merge commit, linear history).