Pristine-lfs can store pristine upstream tarballs in Git leveraging Git LFS. Instead of storing the potentially large tarballs within the Git repository as blobs, Git LFS only stores specially prepared metadata in the repository, while storing the actual file contents out of band on a Git LFS server.

Using pristine-lfs allows Debian packages to be built entirely using sources in version control, without the need to keep copies of upstream tarballs.

An optional upstream signature may be attached to tarballs for verification by, for example, dpkg-source(1).