If you have to handle non DFSG clean upstream sources you can use a different branch which you have to create once: &gitcmd; branch dfsg_clean upstream This creates the dfsg_clean branch from the tip of a branch called upstream. Then, when importing a new upstream version, you import the new version on the upstream-branch (by default named upstream) as usual and just don't merge to the debian-branch (by default named master): &git-import-orig; --no-merge /path/to/nondfsg-clean-package_10.4.orig.tar.gz &gitcmd; tag 10.4 After the import you can switch to the dfsg_clean branch and get the newly imported changes from the upstream branch: &gitcmd; checkout dfsg_clean &gitcmd; pull . upstream Now make this checkout dfsg clean (preverably by a cleanup script), commit your changes and merge to your debian-branch: cleanup-script.sh &gitcmd; commit -a -m "Make source dfsg clean" &gitcmd; tag 10.4.dfsg &gitcmd; checkout master &gitcmd; pull . dfsg_clean First create a branch that holds the NMUs from the tip of your debian-branch (default is master) once: &gitcmd; branch nmu master To import an NMU change into the git repository and use &git-import-dsc;: &gitcmd; checkout master &git-import-dsc; --debian-branch=nmu /path/to/package_1.0-1nmu0.dsc This will import the NMU onto the branched named nmu instead of the default master. This method can also be used to import "old" releases into the &git; repository when migrating to &git; from another VCS. Since &pbuilder; uses different command line arguments than &debuild; and &dpkg-buildpackage; we can't simply pass the options on the command line but have to wrap them in the --git-builder option instead: git-buildpackage --git-builder="pdebuild --debbuildopts '-I.git -i\.git'" --git-cleaner="fakeroot debian/rules clean" Note that we also used a different clean command since since &pdebuildcmd; clean means something different than &debuildcmd; clean. The above is a bit long, so using a tiny script that gets invoked by &git-buildpackage; is more convienient: cat <<EOF >/usr/local/bin/gbp-pbuilder #!/bin/sh # pass commandline arguments to dpkg-buildpackage pdebuild --debbuildopts "-i\.git -I.git $*" EOF chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/gbp-pbuilder This makes the above look like: git-buildpackage --git-builder=gbp-pbuilder --git-cleaner="fakeroot debian/rules clean" We can shorten this further by using ~/.gbp.conf: cat <<EOF > ~/.gbp.conf [DEFAULT] # tell git-buildpackage howto clean the source tree cleaner = fakeroot debian/rules clean # this is how we invoke pbuilder, arguments passed to git-buildpackage will be # passed to dpkg-buildpackge in the chroot builder = /usr/local/bin/gbp-pbuilder Invoking &git-buildpackage; will now invoke &pdebuildcmd; by default and all additional command line arguments are passed to dpkg-buildpackage. If you want to use debuild again (without modifying ~/.gbp.conf) you can use: git-buildpackage --git-builder=debuild Futhrermore, if you don't want this for all your invocations of &git-buildpackage; you can use .git/gbp.conf in one of your &git; repositories instead of ~/.gbp.conf. Whenever you need to work on an arbitrary Debian package you can check it right into &git; with one command: apt-get source --download-only package git-import-dsc package*.dsc cd package git-branch debian This puts the orig.tar.gz onto the upstream-branch and the Debian patch onto a branch called debian. Now you can easily modify the package, revert changes you made, create other branches for testing, see what changes you made, etc.. When finished just do git-commit -a git-diff debian -- to get a nice patch that can be submitted to the Debian BTS.