I’ve packaged latexdiff for debian, that is a small utility to generate latex files with revision markers from multiple versions of the same file. While packaging this utility I’ve learned about two very nice tools to help the debian maintainers: git-buildpackage and topgit.
Regarding git-buildpackage there is an extensive manual that should get you started : http://honk.sigxcpu.org/projects/git-buildpackage/manual-html/gbp.html
Topgit documentation is a bit sparse. tg help <command> should
guide you for syntax. The README file in the tg distribution is full
of examples.
Zack’s work on debcheckout to make it topgit aware is also very interesting ( http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/10/debcheckout_hacking/ )
I’ve put everything on alioth.debian.org in my personal git space following these instructions : http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/Git
the git repo is here : http://git.debian.org/?p=users/munga-guest/latexdiff.git;a=summary
to build the package :
debcheckout git://git.debian.org/git/users/munga-guest/latexdiff.git
debian/rules tg-export
git-buildpackage --git-pristine-tar --git-ignore-new
the second command debian/rules tg-export exports the patch
from the git branch that is managed by topgit and transform it to a
quilt patch that will be applied to the master branch to generate the package.
You can also get the package in the usual way with dget : dget -u http://alioth.debian.org/~munga-guest/latexdiff_0.5-1.dsc
This package is nice and easy, with only on patch, so it should be nice to see what topgit, git-buildpackage is all about.