Dear Maintainer,

Please consider maintaining coreutils in a distributed VCS; this would
make it easier for others to help with the packaging (and could even
make things easier for you).  As far as I can tell, git has the best
support (in git-buildpackage):

  * Easy importing: if a linear history in dpkg-version-order is fine,
    "git-import-dscs --pristine-tar /path/to/*.dsc" gets you that, or
    "git-import-dscs --debsnap --pristine-tar coreutils" if you don't
    have all the .dscs somewhere (and do have enough space in /tmp).

    (Caveat: snapshots.debian.org doesn't have them all, either: even
    some recent versions, such as 8.20-1, didn't make it in.)

  * Upstream tarball storage: pristine-tar stores enough information to
    reconstitute upstream tarballs from the upstream source trees that
    git-buildpackage stores anyway, rather than requiring tarballs to be
    managed externally.

  * Changelogs: git-dch(1) transcribes changelog entries from commits
    messages to debian/changelog, which makes it easy to include draft
    entries in patches without worrying about merge conflicts.

Of course, the most important thing is that git is a distributed VCS, so
contributors can take full advantage of version control without any
prior arrangement or trust: commit first, ask questions later!

(Actually, the most important thing is to use a VCS: just about any VCS
would at least make it pretty easy to get a useful diff to send in,
whereas it's not at all obvious how to do this with an unpacked & edited
source package.)