I just saw your comments on the ITP about creating a stripped branch I package some sources that have an upstream debian/ tree in their tarball. I just use the "--filter" argument to git-import-orig and it excludes that. You can use the same argument to exclude any other file or subtree, but I can imagine it becoming cumbersome to maintain. Just what type of stuff do you need to exclude/filter? Do you believe it will change over time?