In order to build a &debian; package from the &git; repository you use: &git-buildpackage;. During the development phase (when you're either not on the debian-branch or when you have uncommitted changes in your repository) you'll usually use: &git-buildpackage; --git-ignore-new If &git-buildpackage; doesn't find a valid upstream tarball it will create one by looking at the tag matching the upstream version, if no tag can be found it uses the tip of the current upstream-branch. Any other treeish objecto to create the upstream tarball from can be given with the --upstream-branch option. Once you're satisfied with the build and want to do a release you commit all your changes and issue: &git-buildpackage; --git-tag This will again build the debian package and tag the final result after extracting the current version from the changelog. If you want &gpg; signed tags you can use the --git-sign and --git-keyid options. To safe typing these option can be specified via the configuration files. You can futhermore change the tag format used when creating tags with the debian-tag option. Tools like &svn-buildpackage; use a separate build-area. To achieve a similar behaviour with &git-buildpackage; use the --git-export-dir option: &git-buildpackage; --git-export-dir=../build-area/ This will export the current branch head to ../build-area/package-version, check out the corresponding upstream tree to build the .orig.tar.gz if necessary and build the package. If you don't want to export the current branch head you can use --git-export to export any treeish object, here are some examples: &git-buildpackage; --git-export-dir=../build-area --git-export=debian/0.4.3 &git-buildpackage; --git-export-dir=../build-area --git-export=etch &git-buildpackage; --git-export-dir=../build-area --git-export=8caed309653d69b7ab440e3d35abc090eb4c6697 If you want to default to build in a separate build area you can specify the directory to use in the gbp.conf. [git-buildpackage] # use a build area relative to the git repository export-dir=../build-area # to use the same build area for all packages use an absolute path: #export-dir=/home/debian-packages/build-area