Managing packages with GNU arch

[Jérôme Marant <jmarant@free.fr>]

Hi,

I'm interested in managing my packages with GNU Arch.

I've seen many approaches so far:

1/ - having an upstream branch where you store the content of
   the orig tarball
   - having an debian branch from the upstream one which adds
   the debian directory

2/ - storing the upstream tarball and the debian directory
   separately within different categories and gatthering
   everything by the means of a config spec.

I know there are tla-buildpackage and arch-buildpackage, but
I don't have time to get much details about both programs.
AFAIK, tla-buildpackage seems to perform 1/ and
arch-buildpackage seems to work like 2/

Does anyone have ideas about "best practices"? What are
the pros and the cons of both methods? Are there any other
methods?

TIA.

-- 
Jérôme