The debian packaging process included the [de-]applicaiton of patches that were the commits made since the last tag. This provided greater transparency as to exactly what was included in a release when it was made between tags.

Unfortunately the process that was being used to achieve this failed in a scenario where there were patches to files which were later removed from the tarball making process.

For what it's worth, the right way to correct this and keep the transparency is to have "make dist" create the tarball from the most recent tag made and then have the patches generated that bring the source up to current HEAD. In order to achieve this however both debian and RPM packaging would need to operate in this manner. That would mean adding Patch$n: lines to the RPM spec for each of the generated patches. I'm not really sure we want to go there though.