The Oolite sources are hosted and distributed on GitHub.

Human-readable sources (ObjectiveC, JavaScript and so on) are stored
in the oolite.git repository.  Some commits are tagged as releases
according to the usual scheme. Latest version may be detected,
downloaded and repackaged without non-DFSG stuff with uscan(1).

This documentation will assume that the downloaded version is
# tag=1.80b

Images and sounds are distributed in a separate git submodule, for
which diffs do not mean much. Unfortunately, this submodule has no
tags and we need to manually do uscan's job.
The submodules are listed at https://github.com/OoliteProject/,
and you will need to find the revision corresponding to $tag.
# binrev=22d5bdb097ef50840f0c6a72dcbbdbd761aff643
# wget https://github.com/OoliteProject/oolite-binary-resources/archive/$binrev.tar.gz
# mv $binrev.tar.gz oolite_$tag.orig-binary-resources.tar.gz

This second tarball will be detected by dpkg-source when building the
source package, mentioned in the dsc file, and extracted into the
binary-resources/ subdirectory.  The git submodule is intended for
Resources/Binary/, but dpkg cannot do that directly. A symbolic link
will fix this before the build process.

The Debian packaging is maintained in a git repository.

The "upstream" branch contains the files distributed by upstream tarballs.
Meaning: repackaged, unpatched upstream archives, excluding Resources/Binary/.
The "dfsg_clean" branch was once used, but can now be ignored.
The "master" branch adds the Debian packaging.

You will need the "git-buildpackage" debian package. Its usage is described
in http://wiki.debian.org/PackagingWithGit, with a link to the full manual.
Pristine-tar and patch-queue are not used.

In brief:

# Clone the whole repository.
gbp-clone --all git://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-games/oolite.git

# Enter the directory containing the local copy.
cd oolite

# Extract images and sounds. Git knows nothing about this directory.
mkdir binary-resources
tar -xf ../oolite_$tag.orig-binary-resources.tar.gz -C binary-resources --strip-components=1

# Apply Debian patches, build, unapply Debian patches.
debuild -us -uc

# Clean the tree.
debuild clean

Launching "gitk --all &" may help a lot.

 -- Nicolas Boulenguez <nicolas@debian.org>, Mon, 24 Aug 2015 16:51:47 +0200
