It would be great if the following command (or similar) would just work:

$ git-buildpackage --git-branch=sid git://git.debian.org/pkg-multimedia/vlc.git -S

Take care!

This makes sense. We don't even need an extra parameter --git-branch
since we can simply use what's there for branch naming. I'd simply add a
--git-clone-from option:

$ git-buildpackage --git-debian-branch=sid --git-upstream-branch=upstream --git-clone=git://git.debian.org/pkg-multimedia/vlc.git -S

We can then simply invoke gbp-pull with these options from within
git-buildpackage:

 gbp-pull --debian-branch=sid --upstream-branch=upstream git://git.debian.org/pkg-multimedia/vlc.git

I'll have to finish some other things first before looking at it so
patches are (as always) welcome.
Cheers,
 -- Guido

Thinking about this again I wonder if we shouldn't turn this around
like:

	gbp-pull --build

and

	git-clone --build git:///

so we'd just add a --build option to gbp-{pull,clone}. The commands
would behave as the do now but after finishing spawn git-buildpackage.
This way it would also work out of the box for existing repositories.
 -- Guido