Converting an existing Git repository

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 upstream with:

mv .git/theupstream-branch .git/upstream
    

or you can tell git-buildpackage the name of the branch:

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

If you use git-import-orig to import new upstream sources, they will end up on theupstream-branch and merged to master.

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

The important thing here is that the COMMIT_ID specifies a point on the master branch that carried only the upstream sources and not the debian modifications. The above example assumes that this was the first commit to that repository.

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 git-import-orig should work as expected.