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+I've been using git for a while, like it a lot, and finally decided it's time 
+to move all my Debian packaging work over from CVS.  After a frustrating few 
+hours trying, I gave up on trying to use git-cvsimport.  It generates mangled 
+repositories even for simple packages like sudo.  The 
+git-import-dsc tool in the git-buildpackage package works fine as far it goes, 
+but I'd really like to preserve my history.  So, after some consultation on 
+IRC, I took a look at parsecvs.  It didn't quite work out of the box, either, 
+but looks promising, and the 
+author showed an immediate interest in the problems I'm having and offered
+to help.  So, perhaps I'll be able to use it before long...
+
+In the meantime, a while back I offered to help Gudjon I. Gudjonsson 
+restructure the sdcc packages so that a DFSG compliant version can return to
+main with a full version under a different package name going in 
+non-free.  This is all necessary because some of the assemblers provided 
+in the package have a non-commercial use clause in the license, and 
+there are also license
+issues with the HTML documentation.  I care about this because sdcc is a
+build dependency for gnuradio, which I maintain for Debian (it uses the 8051 
+toolchain to build downloadable code for the USRP, etc).  While waiting for 
+parsecvs to get some love and attention, I sat down this evening to 
+restructure sdcc and move it to git.
+
+I'm pretty happy with my progress so far, though there's a bit left to do 
+before uploads happen.  Gudjon and I decided to use the 
+<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/PackagingProject">collab-maint</a>
+facilities on alioth.debian.org for collaboration, which took me a little 
+head-scratching to figure out, but looks like a perfect fit for our needs.  I 
+updated the wiki page about 
+<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/Git"> Git on Alioth</a>
+with a few of my learnings as I went through the process.
+
+Using git branching to handle non-DFSG-compliant upstream sources is pretty
+obvious, the notes in the git-buildpackage documentation helped.  Using 
+pristine-tar to capture the deltas required to regenerate orig.tar.gz files
+from the git repo is amazingly cool.  It's hard to believe how much friendlier
+the world seems when you don't have to drag a bunch of tarballs around with 
+you to do useful work!  And git-buildpackage has suitable options to make
+using it pretty automatic.  Great stuff!
+
+It's likely to be a few days before I can get back to this, finish up, and 
+upload the results of this restructuring work.  In the meantime, I'm writing
+this entry largely to offer my compliments to everyone involved in making 
+git-buildpackage, alioth, and collab-maint work so well.  Special thanks to 
+Joey Hess, whose pristine-tar package is another in a long line of absolutely 
+brilliant tools that contribute to making my life easier!  I'm going to end up
+using it a lot.
+
+[[!tag tags/debian]]