Upstream sources on a branch

If the upstream sources are already on a separate branch things are pretty simple. You can either rename that branch to the default upstream-branch name upstream with:

git branch upstream theupstream-branch
git branch -D theupstream-branch
    

cat <<EOF > .git/gbp.conf
[DEFAULT]
# this is the upstream-branch:
upstream-branch=theupstream-branch
EOF
    

Upstream sources not on a branch

If you don't have an upstream branch but started your repository with only the upstream sources (not the debian patch) you can simply branch from that point. So use gitk or git-log to locate the commit-id of that commit and create the upstream branch from there, e.g.:

    COMMIT_ID=`git log --pretty=oneline | tail -1 | awk '{ print $1 }'`
    git branch upstream $COMMIT_ID

In order to fix this you can prepend the upstream sources as a single commit to your tree using Git's grafts. Afterwards you can simply create a branch as explained above and gbp import-orig will work as expected.

Alternatively, if you are only importing source from original tarballs (for instance when converting from a Subversion repository where the mergeWithUpstream was set for svn-buildpackage), you can create an empty upstream branch with the following commands:

    git checkout --orphan upstream
    git rm -rf .
    git commit --allow-empty -m 'Initial upstream branch.'
    git checkout -f master

    git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/upstream
    git rm --cached -r .
    git commit --allow-empty -m 'Initial upstream branch.'
    git checkout -f master

No upstream tarballs

If upstream doesn't build upstream tarballs or you don't care about them the simplest way is to clone upstreams repository and create a separate packaging branch in there.

In order to help gbp buildpackage to find upstream tags you need to specify the format using the --git-upstream-tag comand line option or the the upstream-tag configuration variable.

A common upstream format is to put a v in front of the version number. In this case the configuration option would look like:

[git-buildpackage]
upstream-tag = v%(version)s
	

version will be replaced with the upstream version number as read from debian/changelog.

If you're using pristine-tar you can make gbp buildpackage commit the generated tarball back to the pristine-tar branch by using the --git-pristine-tar-commit option. This will make sure others building your package can regenerate the tarball you generated for building the Debian pacakge.

	    git clone --no-checkout -o upstream git://git.example.com/libgbp.git
	    cd libgbp
	    git checkout -b debian/sid v1.0
	  

	    gbp buildpackage --git-pristine-tar --git-pristine-tar-commit --git-upstream-tag='v%(version)s' --git-debian-branch=debian/sid
	  

	    git fetch upstream
	    git merge v1.1
	    gbp dch --debian-branch=debian/sid --snapshot --auto debian/
	    gbp buildpackage --git-ignore-new --git-pristine-tar --git-pristine-tar-commit --git-upstream-tag='v%(version)s'
	  

	    gbp dch --release --auto --git-debian-branch=debian/sid
	    git commit -m"Release 1.1-1" debian/changelog
	    gbp buildpackage --git-upstream-tag='v%(version)s' --git-debian-branch=debian/sid
	  

Upstream tarballs

If you want to track upstream's git but continue to import the upstream tarballs, e.g. to make sure the tarball uploaded to Debian has the same checksum as upstream's you can use the --upstream-vcs-tag option when importing new tarballs with gbp import-orig. Assuming you have the upstream source in your repository with a tag v0.0.1 you can use:

	    gbp import-orig --upstream-vcs-tag=v0.0.1 foo_0.0.1.orig.tar.gz