Comment by cryptonector

> Rebasing would mean there's no continuous versioning of the "patches on top", which might be undesirable. Also, the history rewriting might make cooperation difficult.

Let's say you have these version tags upstream: foo-1.0.1, foo-1.1.0, foo-1.3.0, and corresponding Debian releases 1.0.1-0, 1.1.0-0, 1.1.0-1, 1.3.0-0, 1.3.0-1, and 1.3.0-2, and the same 3 patches in all cases, except slightly different in each case. Then to see the several different versions of these patches you'd just `git log --oneline foo-${version}..debian-${version}-${deb_version}`.