> The discussion about what is wrong with making external packages > native is reiterated once every few months, and I'm not going to > repeat it here. Search the archives.
I read some of the discussion (and am going to read all of it). I think that there are a number of advantages to having the debian/ directory upstream. If dpkg-buildpackage and assorted tools did not assume that there is no diff because there is a debian/ directory (or however they assume that), then maintainers could do everything they need without a need to be extremely sync'ed up with upstream, and non-maintainers would have the advantage of being able to package for Debian from upstream. I see this of great value when, for example, one want to build a new library or package on a stable system, where the official Debian package is in unstable, and hasn't been moved to stable yet (which may take more than a year). YA
