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git can be seen as porcelain on top of patch quilting so it's not as much done âge as one might think

This is a misunderstanding of what Git does. Git is a Merkle hash tree, content-addressed, immutable/append-only filesystem, with commits as objects that bind a filesystem root by its hash. The diffs that make up a commit are not really its contents -- they are computed as needed. Now most of the time it's best to think of Git as a patch quilting porcelain, but it's really more than that, and while you can get very far with the patch quilting porcelain model, at some point you need to understand that it goes deeper.

That point is not reached during packaging though.

I prefer rebasing git histories over messing with the patch quilting that debian packaging standards use(d to use). Though last I had to use the debian packaging mechanisms, I roundtripped them into git for working on them. I lost nothing during the export.

Yes, I also end up doing things like that, but it's just a pain. If Debian did it themselves then adding a local commit would be truly trivial.

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