* Otto Kekäläinen: > Is somebody else already doing something similar like this?
We are doing this with glibc in Fedora, which is not Debian, but kind of similar. We try to push all backportable fixes to the upstream release branches (and master) and synthesize new pseudo-release tarballs from those branches. This means that (the equivalent of) .orig.tar.xz reflects upstream contents, but necessarily an actual release tarball. This means that the set of downstream patches is reasonably small, and grows only moderately due to ongoing bug-fixing. In some cases, we want to backport things into Fedora which do not seem appropriate for upstream, and those end up as patch files. The distribution packaging bits do not live in the upstream repository, but we have special (glibc-specific) scripts which allow us to merge in upstream changes (using git cherrypick and git rebase), so this mostly a matter of training people to use these scripts. I think this approach is only possible because we have stable release branches upstream where we can backport the things we are interested in (and other contributors are reasonably conservative), and we are willing to respin the tarballs. It simplifies matters for the uploaders, but we cannot easily bisect individual changes/upstream commits because they do not exist downstream, and the upstream repository lacks the distribution customizations.