Pristine-tar can regenerate a pristine upstream tarball using only a small binary delta file and a revision control checkout of the upstream branch.

The package also includes a pristine-gz command, which can regenerate a pristine .gz file, a pristine-bz2 for .bz2 files, and a pristine-xz for .xz files.

The delta file is designed to be checked into revision control along-side the upstream branch, thus allowing Debian packages to be built entirely using sources in revision 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).