This is great. I've been thinking along those lines, of keeping separate branches for conffiles, an origin/<package> branch for what debian ships, and a local/<package> branch for what I have.

I am looking for this a long time ago, but would like to see it with a svnstore. Would you mind to discuss here why svn do "suck" apart of the central-repo-only (dis)ability?

getopenid.com/tekknokrat

This is great. At the moment I'm trying to figure out a solution though that includes the ability to push to a central server. This should be simple enough by editing .git/config . What would be really cool though is if admins login with their normal username, then sudo add/commit/push which uses their local ~/.gitconfig and ssh keys. That way you could easily track who has made what edits without having to remember to put it into comments. I notice http://bryan-murdock.blogspot.com/2007/07/put-etc-under-revision-control-with-git.html uses a $caller environment variable, but it would be really smart if it actually set the author correctly in the git repository. Any ideas how to do this?

It would seem that you can achieve this by starting ssh-agent, then running ssh-add. Then when running sudo git push will use the real users identity :D