Debian contemplates patch management

>  There is, however, no central RCS for Debian source packages.
Indeed there is none of central one, but most of the packages now carry Vcs-{git,svn,...} and
Vcs-browser fields in their debian/control files. and very many keep their central VCS (or
some kind of clone) on alioth (although it is irrelevant indeed), especially if maintenance is
collaborative (ie by a team).

AND there is a tool now withing Debian's devscripts: "debcheckout -  checkout the development
repository of a Debian package" which makes use of those Vcs fields, so if I need a possibly
updated maintainer version of repository for fail2ban I just run 'debcheckout fail2ban' and I
see everything -- upstream, debian sources and branches which were merged into the release
branch, quite easy and quick. Sure thing not all packages provide Vcs- header fields but quite
a few