-The thought behind this is that from Debian's point of view, upstream
-releases are immutable points in history, better represented by tags.
+Except when (i) upstream releases only tarballs, (ii) we require DFSG
+filtering, or (iii) you also happen to be involved in upstream
+development, we do not maintain any local branch corresponding to
+upstream, except temporary branches used to prepare patches for
+forwarding, and the like.
+
+The idea here is that from Debian's point of view, upstream releases
+are immutable points in history. We want to make sure that we are
+basing our Debian package on a properly identified upstream version,
+rather than some arbitrary commit on some branch. Tags are more
+useful for this.
+
+Upstream's branches remain available as the git remote tracking
+branches for your upstream remote, e.g. I<remotes/upstream/master>.