[yencabulator]

Because historically, what's in a release tarball is not what's in the repository. In many cases, the release tarball of an old C/autoconf project has "half-built". Debian has always worked from the release tarballs, and thus if you "just" import Debian packaging into a VCS, you don't necessarily track every upstream commit, just the releases.

(Independently importing release tarballs into VCS also worked better in the era of a dozen competing VCSes, without reliable export-import pipelines.)

[simoncion]

I think you're either confused, or have attached your comment to the wrong parent?

My observations and questions were about the GNU bash git repo and how (and why) the bash maintainers do release branching and tagging. They were not about how the Debian folks handle their packaging.

[yencabulator]

Oh yeah. The thread before that talked about Debian packaging.