I strongly agree with Ian in this matter. I think there are at least two cases where this issue comes up and is importand, and where using a debian revision without separate upstream tarballs is the right approach: 1) small packages currently maintained by the upstream maintainer where debian revision is incremented for packaging only changes and upstream revision is incremented for upstream versions and 2) Cases typically outside the Debian archive where a git tree is being built as a Debian package especially as part of a CI system and where the effort of tracking upstream tarballs is undesired. 2) is more of an issue for lintian than it is for debian-policy. While I feel strongly about this, and believe that I adequately explained my position years ago on debian-devel when dpkg first started rejecting packages with debian revisions and 3.0(native) format, I don't have the emotional energy for a discussion of this. The way I was treated by the dpkg maintainer back then caused me to stop working on Debian for months and seriously consider moving on to other things. I just don't have the emotional bandwidth to deal with a discussion where well-considered arguments will be ignored and/or dismissed with little consideration. So, +1 on this, but don't expect me to be able to participate much in the discussion.
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