[mxey]

How do you track changes to the patches themselves?

[cryptonector]

By having a naming convention for your tags and branches, then you can always identify the upstream "base" upon which the Debian "patches" are based, and then you can trivially use `git log` to list them.

Really, Git has a solution to this. If you insist that it doesn't without looking, you'll just keep re-inventing the wheel badly.

[blibble]

but then if I want to see the history for a specific patch, or bisect them?

mercurial has a patch queue extension that married it and quilt, which was very easy to use

[IshKebab]

You can keep the old branches around if you want. Or merge instead of rebasing.